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REPRESENTATIVE 

ESSAYS IN 
MODERN THOUGHT 

A Basis for Composition 

EDITED BY 

HARRISON ROSS STEEVES, A.M. 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
AND 

FRANK HUMPHREY RISTINE, Ph.D 

ACTING PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
IN HAMILTON COLLEGE 




NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 



■i-^ 



^^^<=.-\ 



Copyright, 1913, by 
H. E. STEEVE8 AND F. H. RISTINE 

Copyright, 1913, in Great Britain. 

representative essays 
W. P. I 




©CLA330978 



PREFACE 

In presenting this volume to teachers of English composi- 
tion, the editors realize that it can hardly fail to suffer from 
the suspicion of novelty which confronts new publications in a 
conservative educational field. It is hoped, however, that ini- 
tial distrust of the book because of its novelty will not outlive a 
fair trial of the methods and materials which it offers. This 
hope is based upon successful experiment with much of the sub- 
stance of the volume among students as varied and as cosmo- 
politan as the undergraduates in Columbia College, and upon 
the generous and often enthusiastic support that the underlying 
idea has received from prominent educators throughout the 
country who have had occasion to pass judgment upon its value. 

In the preparation of the collection for classroom use we 
have prefixed to each essay a brief introductory note intended 
to give relevant biographical facts and to assist the student to 
an understanding of the design of the work. In addition, where 
suggestions as to other material of direct bearing upon the sub- 
ject under discussion seemed to us to be of value for collateral 
reading, we have included references to such writings. Some 
of the authors' footnotes to the essays have been omitted as 
foreign to the purpose of the book, and others have been sup- 
plied wherever the text seemed to require elucidation or inter- 
pretation. Our principle has been, however, to restrict the 
formal teaching apparatus of the volume to the general intro- 
duction, and to encumber the selections themselves with the 
minimum of annotation. In the printing of the essays we 
have followed accurately the original forms, retaining sub-titles 
and numbered divisions where these were essential to the 
logical arrangement of the essay. 

This volume includes substantially the essays which, when 
we first discussed the plan of publication, we chose tentatively 



iv PREFACE 

as the most available for our purpose. That what seemed to 
us the ideal plan should be brought to completion with scarcely 
a modification is for us a matter for special gratitude, since any 
effort to reproduce on an extensive scale writings still in copy- 
right must be conditioned largely upon the generosity of pub- 
lishers. Our thanks for publishing privileges, therefore, are 
emphatically more than formal. We have been enabled to 
use copyright material through the kindness of Mr. Henry 
James, Jr., Dr. Dole, Mr. Mallock, Professor Hobhouse, Pro- 
fessor Clark, President Hadley, and Mr. Harrison; and by the 
permission of Messrs. D. Appleton and Company, Henry Holt 
and Company, Longmans, Green, and Company, John Murray, 
The Macmillan Company, the American Association for Inter- 
national Conciliation, the Fortnightly Review, the Harvard Theo- 
logical Review, and the Atlantic Monthly. We desire also to 
express our acknowledgments to Viscount Morley and Dr. 
Alfred Russel Wallace, and to Macmillan and Company (Lon- 
don), the Popular Science Monthly, the Contemporary Review, 
and the Edinburgh Co-operative Printing Company Limited. 

The task of selecting the essays and preparing the collection 
for publication has been materially lightened by the friendly 
cooperation of a number of our colleagues who have interested 
themselves in the undertaking. We are under special obliga- 
tion to Professor John Erskine, to whom in large measure the 
credit for the educational program must be given, and who has 
aided our work with many helpful suggestions. Others to whom 
we have been indebted for advice and active interest are Pro- 
fessor Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, Professor Herbert G. Lord, 
Professor Ashley H. Thorndike, Professor Robert A. Harper, 
Professor Monroe Smith, Mr. Frederick P. Keppel, Dean of 
Columbia College, Professor Joseph V. Denney, of Ohio State 
University, Dr. Carl Van Doren, Mr. John J. Coss, and Dr. 

Ernest Stagg Whitin. 

H. R. S. 
F. H. R. 

Columbia University, 
June, 191 2. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction vii 

I. Matthew Arnold : Sweetness and Light . . . i 

II. Thomas Henry Huxley : Science and Culture . . 28 

III. William Kingdon Clifford : The Ethics of Belief . 46 

IV. William James : The Will to Believe . . . .73 
V. John Stuart Mill : Of the Liberty of Thought and 

Discussion 98 

VI. John Morley : Of the Possible Utility of Error . 141 
VII. William Hurrel Mallock : The Scientific Bases of 

Optimism 163 

VIII. Thomas Henry Huxley : Darwin on the Origin of 

Species 199 

IX. Alfred Russel Wallace : Darwinism as applied to 

Man 238 

X. John Tyndall : The Belfast Address . . . .272 

XL Charles Fletcher Dole : Truth and Immortality . 321 

XII. Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse : Law and Justice . 341 

XIII. Henry Sumner Maine : The Prospects of Popular 

Government 376 

XIV. Arthur Twining Hadley : Ethics of Corporate Man- 

agement 412 

XV. William Morris : The Labor Question from the So- 
cialist Standpoint 430 

XVI. John Bates Clark : Education and the Socialist Move- 
ment .......... 454 

XVII. John Stuart Mill : The Subjection of Women . . 470 

XVIII. Frederic Harrison : The Future of Woman . . 502 

XIX. William James : The Moral Equivalent of War . 519 



INTRODUCTION 

This book has been compiled under the conviction that 
composition can be taught more effectively with ideas 
rather than with literary models or set exercises as the point 
of departure. That this conviction is opposed to some 
time-honored ideas of composition, the editors are fully 
aware. They are also aware that most teachers are agreed 
that the old methods of teaching composition are unsatis- 
factory ; and it is the prevalence of this opinion which 
lends support to the belief that a book presenting a new 
method of handling the subject of composition ought not 
to be unwelcome, especially if the method has been tried 
successfully for some time at a representative university. 

To many it must seem that one obvious reason for the 
failure of the older methods to accomplish the best results 
lies in the inadequacy of the material commonly employed 
in composition courses. This material usually consists of 
literary selections, which, for students of the age and train- 
ing of the average freshman, generally fail to sustain in- 
terest ; or it descends to trivialities, in overworking, fre- 
quently by the "daily theme" method, the small concerns 
of school or outside life. 

In the behef that a new and more stimulating subject 
matter was desirable, we endeavored a few years ago at 
Columbia University to provide material which when used 
as a basis for composition would serve the purpose of not 
merely developing a formal accuracy in writing, but of 
expanding the student's ideas and increasing the number 



viii INTRODUCTION 

of his points of contact with vital questions. In selecting 
more or less classic approaches to such provinces as biol- 
ogy, philosophy, modern politics, sociology, and practical 
religion, we relied upon the student's desire to know what 
fields of knowledge He before him in his academic work, and 
we relied upon his natural curiosity in questions which, 
once presented, challenge him, as they challenge everybody, 
for answers. The only real problems were : first, to find 
material sufficiently simple and concrete in presentation to 
insure its fitness for this special period of intellectual 
development ; and second, to make this material available 
in a single volume, as naturally the Hbrary facilities were 
overtaxed to provide a large number of students simultane- 
ously with the required reading. 

The result of our experiments with this subject matter 
at Columbia during the past two years has been an im- 
mediate and emphatic response to the stimulating interest 
of the questions taken up, once the students had adjusted 
themselves to the idea. There was scarcely an essay in 
the course which had not an appearance of forbidding 
profundity, or which did not seem to presuppose a more 
special knowledge of a particular field than the average 
freshman has mastered. But if the writing possessed 
sufficient irritancy to start speculation over the question 
presented, the initial objection to profundity disappeared 
and left the student convinced that his own common 
sense and reasoning powers were sufficient equipment for an 
approach to any of the subjects offered. 

The selection of this series of essays as subject matter 
for a course in English composition does not necessarily 
restrict the essays to that use, as the cultural relations of 
the material are sufficiently broad to adapt it to many 
educational ends. The important fact is that in our mod- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

ern college curriculums adequate provision is seldom made 
for allowing the student's stock of ideas on vital ques- 
tions an opportunity for better organization and greater 
expansion, or for orienting him in the field of collegiate 
studies. Possibly much of the diffuseness and ineffective- 
ness of the elective system may be traced to this very condi- 
tion. It may not be the particular province of the English 
department to remedy these deficiencies, but it seems clear 
that since teachers of Enghsh are so frequently obhged 
to go hunting for subject matter, such an opportunity 
may profitably be accepted, particularly if it serve the 
purpose of accomplishing two important educational ends 
at once. With the general and commendable tendency to 
establish a definite coordination between the various sub- 
jects of undergraduate study, however, there can be little 
question that whether the "course in ideas" is given as phi- 
losophy, history, English, or as the growingly popular general 
culture course, in any event it has a place of profound value 
in the college curriculum, and is probably most beneficial 
when presented as one of the first steps in the student's work. 
A device which experience has shown to be very successful 
has been followed all but uniformly throughout the present 
volume. Whenever a problem has been introduced about 
which " much may be said on both sides," two typical essays, 
representing the two points of view, have been offered. For 
this reason Arnold's Sweetness and Light, which upholds the 
traditional classical culture, is opposed to Huxley's Science 
and Culture, which defends the viewpoint of modern science. 
W. K. Clifford's Ethics of Belief, emphasizing scientific 
skepticism as a moral obligation, is followed by Professor 
James's Will to Believe, which justifies the acceptance with- 
out proof of religious behefs. Huxley's Darwinian essay and 
Tyndall's Belfast Address, both of which at least suggest a 



X INTRODUCTION 

materialistic philosophy, are contrasted with Dr. Dole's 
Truth and Immortality, a reasoned argument for belief in a 
future life. The two essays on socialism and the two on 
the present position of women afford similar contrasts in 
treatment. Such a grouping of mutually opposed con- 
structive ideas is of course emphatically more stimulating 
both to the imagination and the reason than the presentation 
of one side of questions which have been historically matters 
of dispute. In the case of such works, however, as Mr. 
Mallock's Scientific Bases of Optimism, a criticism of a typi- 
cally modern philosophical position, and Sir Henry Sumner 
Maine's Prospects of Popular Government, a British analysis 
of the institution of democracy, the issues defined are aca- 
demic rather than popular, and are presented with so much 
originality and force that they are probably sufficient in 
themselves to establish the high interest of the questions with 
which they deal, without the risk of cultivating prejudices. 
Since this volume may represent a new and unfamiliar 
educational program to many, a word as to our method of 
handling these essays as materials for composition may not 
be out of order. In the first place, it has been our custom 
to use this reading for the second half of the freshman year, 
and to prepare the way for this term's work by composition 
drill during the first term, by impromptu themes written in 
class and based upon assigned selections that give oppor- 
tunity for an understanding of the methods of scientific in- 
quiry. An effective method of approach in this first term lies 
in the use of historical memoirs, autobiography, books of 
the Bible, and literary works of historical flavor, for the 
purpose of establishing inductively some primary concep- 
tions of social, political, and moral evolution. A variety of 
material of this sort will immediately suggest itself : for ex- 
ample, Homer, Sophocles, or iEschylus ; Plutarch's Lives ; the 



INTRODUCTION xi 

less intricate dialogues of Plato, such as the Protagoras ; 
Norse sagas — or decently faithful reproductions of their 
spirit, as Morris's Lovers of Gudrun; parts of CeUini's auto- 
biography ; Chesterfield's Letters, — anything which depicts 
vividly the influence of custom upon ideas and actions. We 
have been accustomed to alternate this reading with literary 
work less familiar to the average student, and generally less in 
literary pretentiousness than that which his forced prepara- 
tory school instruction has brought him to respect — and some- 
times to detest — without clear reason. Works of this class 
might include the more unfamiliar plays of Shakespeare ; 
simple narrative poems like Wordsworth's Michael and Ten- 
nyson's Enoch Arden; the Ingoldshy Legends ; novels which 
invite discussion, like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, David 
Balfour, Sentimental Tommy ; even the less philosophical of 
the novels of Meredith or Hardy — • The Ordeal of Richard 
Feverel, or The Mayor of Casterhridge. The effect of this 
infusion of lighter literature is to eUminate the student's 
sense of strangeness in a new field by enlarging at the same 
time his knowledge of a field in which he already feels some 
degree of acquaintance. 

With this foundation, then, established during the first 
term, we find the student relieved more or less of the 
tendency to argue and think upon presumptive grounds, and 
generally receptive to the discussion of questions which 
touch his inner life and his relations to men and institu- 
tions. 

In the second term's work we have been accustomed to as- 
sign one piece of reading each week, not limiting ourselves 
to the series of essays printed here — for, once more, this 
volume merely makes available a number of important es- 
says which are generally inaccessible to a large body of 
students — but supplementing our special inquiry with ma- 



xii INTRODUCTION 

terial from the more purely literary field, as it may seem 
expedient. Large possibilities in this direction may be seen 
in both the highways and byways of literature of the late 
nineteenth century, in poems such as Tennyson's In Memo- 
riam, ia modern editorials or magazine articles, in short 
stories interpretative of life, such as Hardy's Fellow-Towns- 
men, Stevenson's Ebb Tide, Kipling's Mowgh stories, or in 
plays of the most modern of moderns, if the student is kept 
properly aware of the glamour of the cleverly expressed half 
truth. 

On each of our weekly assignments we require impromptu 
themes of about five hundred words, written in the class- 
room, upon assigned topics which suggest the saHent points 
of the work under consideration.^ Every effort is made to 
encourage the student to think for himself and to state his 
own position on the questions involved. The usual result is 
that the student discovers, perhaps for the first time, that he 
has ideas on questions of rehgion, morals, politics, social 
conduct, and the like, and develops an interest and fluency 
in expressing them that have been noticeably absent in his 
previous compositions. With his interest once aroused and 
his mind free, the frank dislike of composition work too often 
inspired by distasteful or trivial subject matter may quickly 
disappear, as well as the self-consciousness in writing that a 

1 The editors have not equipped the essays with suggested topics for 
themes, beheving that this part of the program should be left to the judg- 
ment of the teacher in each case. The kind of topics thought most effective, 
however, for, say, Clifford's Ethics of Belief, may be indicated by the fol- 
lowing: Why I agree (or disagree) with Clifford. Something from my own ex- 
perience or observation illustrating the fallacy {or the truth) of one of Clifford's 
contentions. 

The idea is that the topics should be of such a nature as to allow the stu- 
dent no opportunity of merely reproducing the argument or substance of 
the essay, but rather to encourage him to form his own opinions on the ques- 
tions presented and to give him all possible latitude in expressing them. 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

too labored application of rhetorical formulas is apt to 
develop. 

The following meeting of the class is taken up with a 
general discussion of the ideas evolved in the writing ; and 
in this discussion it is not ordinarily necessary to resort to 
artificial methods of sustaining interest. Such discussions, 
which are by their nature free, informal, and even intimate, 
may frequently be pursued into other hours of meeting; 
but in many cases the necessities of composition work re- 
quire attention to matters of form — exclusive of mechanical 
errors, which we beheve should be treated only in individual 
conferences — and this must inevitably reduce the time 
devoted to the "ideas" part of the course. Our program of 
reading and discussion is obviously best adapted to students 
whose preparatory training in the principles of composi- 
tion has been adequate. On the other hand, students whose 
preparation has been deficient should be segregated in a 
special section and given instruction adapted to their needs, 
lest their presence in the regular class hinder the profitable 
employment of the "course in ideas." In the case of stu- 
dents whose composition is not radically faulty but whose 
intellectual maturity may be below that of the average fresh- 
man, discussion of the fundamental problems in the assign- 
ment might very well precede the writing of the themes. 
In fact, wherever the substance of the assignment is really 
profound, or its treatment unusually obscure, an attempt 
at interpretation or at least clarification of the work is to 
be recommended as introductory to the writing itself. But 
whether discussion of the essay precedes or follows the 
writing, the key to effective understanding is discussion 
founded upon common sense, and free from even an intima- 
tion of dogmatic or pedantic assurance. 

This suggested program covers a great deal more material 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

than could possibly be utilized to full advantage in a single 
term's work. We have intimated the extent of the field of 
choice, however, in the belief that further suggestion may- 
facilitate the process of selection for the teacher for whom 
this program is still only experimental. 

It is probably unnecessary to point out that none of the 
essays in this volume are intended by the editors to represent 
their judgments upon the issues involved. Whether right 
or wrong, both conservative and radical points of view have 
been given. In many cases, however, where a difference of 
opinion is clearly inevitable, but where the presentation of 
one side of the question defines the objections that might 
be urged by the opposition, no effort has been made to ad- 
here to a systematic impartiality. The purpose of the vol- 
ume is, after all, to encourage the student to form his own 
opinions upon proper evidence ; and to this end it is not 
necessary in every instance to offer him a choice of opinions 
already formulated. 

Finally, these essays are in many cases not the last word 
of technical accuracy or theoretical subtlety. What we 
have sought, and what we believe we have succeeded in se- 
curing in every work offered here, is a stimulating presenta- 
tion, sufficiently general and dignified in its handling of the 
apparent truth to lay just claim to permanent esteem, even 
though, in some cases, later intellectual progress may 
demonstrate the work to be partially deficient in method 
or in scientific detail. 



REPRESENTATIVE ESSAYS IN MODERN 
THOUGHT: A BASIS FOR COMPOSITION 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 
Matthew Arnold 

[Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), son of the famous educator, Dr. Thomas 
Arnold, is well known as a poet, but more particularly as a critic of litera- 
ture, religion, politics, and society, and as the foremost apostle of culture 
and champion of classical education in a scientific and materiahstic age. 

The following essay is admirably illustrative of this latter phase of his 
activity, and is the recognized classic exposition of the humanist point of 
view. In it Arnold sets forth his ideal of culture as the panacea for the 
social evils of the time and as the means of attaining a harmonious and equal 
development of all those powers in man that are essential for perfect human 
nature. This view of culture underlies Arnold's protest, set forth later in 
Literature and Science, against the growing movement of the age to exalt the 
sciences over the humanities in education. Arnold, while not bhnd to the 
importance of modern scientific truth, maintains that the pursuit of science 
tends toward a one-sided development and leaves man with the greater part 
of his nature unawakened and as unprepared as ever for the practical duty 
of living a harmonious, well balanced, and perfected human life, which the 
study of the classics and the old humanities alone can bring about. This 
contention is answered in the next selection by Huxley, who upholds the 
cultural and educational value of the physical sciences. 

Sweetness and Light was delivered as Arnold's last lecture in the chair 
of poetry at Oxford, and first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for July, 
1867, under the title Culture and Its Etiemies. In 1869 it was pubhshed 
in book form as the opening chapter of the volume Culture and Anarchy.] 

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; some- 
times, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and 
vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a 
smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by 



2 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

nothing so intellectual as curiosity ; it is valued either out of 
sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and 
class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from 
other people who have not got it. No serious man would call 
this culture, or attach any value to it, as culture, at all. To find 
the real ground for the very differing estimate which serious 
people will set upon culture, we must find some motive for 
culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity ; and such 
a motive the word curiosity gives us. 

I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the 
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. 
With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving 
sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the 
mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, 
but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous 
and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little 
time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. 
Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate it in my judgment 
was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this : that in our 
EngUsh way it left out of sight the double sense really involved 
in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to stamp M. 
Sainte-Beuve with blame if it was said that he was impelled in 
his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to 
perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people 
with him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not 
blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted 
worthy of blame and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity 
about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, 
so there is certainly a curiosity, — a desire after the things of the 
mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing 
them as they are, — which is, in an intelligent being, natural 
and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are 
implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often 
attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of 
the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to 
blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says : "The first 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 3 

motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment 
the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being 
yet more intelligent." This is the true ground to assign for 
the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and for cul- 
ture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion ; and it is a worthy 
ground, even though we let the term curiosity stand to describe 
it. 

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the 
scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, nat- 
ural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of 
it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the im- 
pulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for re- 
moving human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing 
human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and 
happier than we found it, — motives eminently such as are called 
social, — come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main 
and preeminent part. Culture is then properly described not as 
having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love 
of perfection ; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, 
not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowl- 
edge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. 
As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montes- 
quieu's words : "To render an intelligent being yet more intelli- 
gent ! " so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which 
it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson : " To make reason 
and the will of God prevail !" 

Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be overhasty 
in determining what reason and the will of God say, because its 
turn is for acting rather than thinking and it wants to be begin- 
ning to act ; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions, 
which proceed from its own state of development and share in all 
the imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action ; 
what distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific 
passion as well as by the passion of doing good ; that it demands 
worthy notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily 
suffer its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for 



4 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

them. And knowing that no action or institution can be salutary 
and stable which is not based on reason and the will of God, it is 
not so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of 
diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, 
but that it can remember that acting and instituting are of little 
use, unless we know how and what we ought to act and to 
institute. 

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than 
that other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for 
knowing. But it needs times of faith and ardor, times when 
the intellectual horizon is opening and widening all round us, to 
flourish in. And is not the close and bounded intellectual horizon 
within which we have long lived and moved now lifting up, and are 
not new lights finding free passage to shine in upon us? For 
a long time there was no passage for them to make their way in 
upon us, and then it was of no use to think of adapting the world's 
action to them. Where was the hope of making reason and the 
will of God prevail among people who had a routine which they 
had christened reason and the will of God, in which they were 
inextricably bound, and beyond which they had no power of 
looking ? But now the iron force of adhesion to the old routine, 
— social, political, religious, — has wonderfully yielded ; the 
iron force of exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully yielded. 
The danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse to 
allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the 
will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or 
other to pass for these too easily, or else that they should under- 
rate the importance of them altogether, and think it enough to 
follow action for its own sake, without troubling themselves to 
make reason and the will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is 
the moment for culture to be of service, culture which believes 
in making reason and the will of God prevail, believes in perfec- 
tion, is the study and pursuit of perfection, and is no longer 
debarred, by a rigid, invincible exclusion of whatever is new, 
from getting acceptance for its ideas, simply because they are 
new. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 5 

The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is 
regarded not solely as the endeavor to see things as they are, to 
draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems 
to be intended and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's 
happiness to go along with or his misery to go counter to, — to 
learn, in short, the will of God, — the moment, I say, culture is 
considered not merely as the endeavor to see and learn this, but as 
the endeavor, also, to make it prevail, the moral, social, and be- 
neficent character of culture becomes manifest. The mere 
endeavor to see and learn the truth for our own personal 
satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it prevail, a 
preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and is 
wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself and 
not only in its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has 
got stamped with blame, and disparaged with the dubious title of 
curiosity, because in comparison with this wider endeavor of 
such great and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and unprofit- 
able. 

And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts 
by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect 
itself, — religion, that voice of the deepest human experience, — 
does not only enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great aim of 
culture, the aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection 
is and to make it prevail ; but also, in determining generally in 
what human perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion 
identical with that which culture, — seeking the determination 
of this question through all the voices of human experience 
which have been heard upon it, of art, science, poetry, philosophy, 
history, as well as of religion, in order to give a greater fullness 
and certainty to its solution, — likewise reaches. Religion says : 
The kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, 
places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth 
and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from 
our animality. It places it in the ever increasing efficacy and 
in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought 
and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happi- 



6 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

ness of human nature. As I have said on a former occasion: 
"It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless ex- 
pansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, 
that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this 
ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value 
of culture." Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a be- 
coming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it ; and 
here, too, it coincides with religion. 

And because men are all members of one great whole, and the 
sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member 
to be indifferent to the rest or to have a perfect welfare indepen- 
dent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea 
of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion.* 
Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the indi- 
vidual remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain 
of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he 
disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards 
perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and 
increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward. 
And here, once more, culture lays on us the same obligation as 
religion, which says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, 
that "to promote the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten 
one's own happiness." 

But, finally, perfection, — as culture from a thorough dis- 
interested study of human nature and human experience learns 
to conceive it, — is a harmonious expansion of all the powers 
which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not 
consistent with the overdevelopment of any one power at the 
expense of the rest. Here culture goes beyond religion, as reli- 
gion is generally conceived by us. 

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious 
perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists 
in becoming something rather than in having something, in an 
inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of 
circumstances, — it is clear that culture, instead of being the 
frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT ; 

Harrison/ and many other Liberals ^ are apt to call it, has a very 
important function to fulfill for mankind. And this function is 
particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole 
civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of 
Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends con- 
stantly to become more so. But above all in our own country 
has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that me- 
chanical character, which civilization tends to take everywhere, 
is shown in the most eminent degree. Indeed nearly all the 
characters of perfection, as culture teaches us to fix them, meet 
in this country with some powerful tendency which thwarts 
them and sets them at defiance. The idea of perfection as an 
inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the 
mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us, and no- 
where, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us. The idea of 
perfection as a general expansion of the human family is at vari- 
ance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits to 
the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our 
maxim of "every man for himself." Above all, the idea of per- 
fection as a harmonious expansion of human nature is at vari- 
ance with our want of flexibility, with our inaptitude for 
seeing more than one side of a thing, with our intense energetic 
absorption in the particular pursuit we happen to be following. 
So culture has a rough task to achieve in this country. Its 
preachers have, and are likely long to have, a hard time of 
it, and they will much oftener be regarded, for a great while 
to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs than as friends and 
benefactors. That, however, will not prevent their doing in the 
end good service if they persevere. And, meanwhile, the mode 
of action they have to pursue, and the sort of habits they must 
fight against, ought to be made quite clear for every one to see, 

^ See p. 502. In an article entitled Culture; a Dialogue {Fortnightly 
Review, November, 1867), Mr. Harrison criticized Arnold's advocacy of 
culture as the remedy for the evils of society. — Editors. 

^ The Liberal party in English politics is made up of adherents to pro- 
gressive political principles. — Editors. 



8 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

who may be willing to look at the matter attentively and dis- 
passionately. 

Faith in machinery ^ is, I said, our besetting danger ; often in 
machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this 
machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve ; but always 
in machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is free- 
dom but machinery ? what is population but machinery ? what 
is coal but machinery ? what are railroads but machinery ? what 
is wealth but machinery ? what are, even, religious organizations 
but machinery ? Now almost every voice in England iS accus- 
tomed to speak of these things as if they were precious ends in 
themselves, and therefore had some of the characters of perfec- 
tion indisputably joined to them. I have before now noticed 
Mr. Roebuck's stock argument for proving the greatness and 
happiness of England as she is, and for quite stopping the 
mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. Roebuck is never weary of reiter- 
ating this argument of his, so I do not know why I should be 
weary of noticing it. " May not every man in England say what 
he likes?" — Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks; and that, he 
thinks, is quite sufficient, and when every man may say what he 
likes, our aspirations ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations 
of culture, which is the study of perfection, are not satisfied, un- 
less what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth 
saying, — has good in it, and more good than bad. In the same 
way the Times, replying to some foreign strictures on the dress, 
looks, and behavior of the English abroad, urges that the English 
ideal is that every one should be free to do and to look just as he 
likes. But culture indefatigably tries, not to make what each 
raw person may like the rule by which he fashions himself, but 
to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is indeed beautiful, grace- 
ful, and becoming, and to get the raw person to like that. 

And in the same way with respect to railroads and coal. Every 
one must have observed the strange language current during the 
late discussions as to the possible failure of our supplies of coal. 

* Arnold uses the word machinery throughout this essay in the sense of 
any kind of means for the accomplishment of ends. — Editors. 



I 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 9 

Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the real basis of 
our national greatness ; if our coal runs short, there is an end of 
the greatness of England. But what is greatness ? — culture 
makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite 
love, interest, and admiration ; and the outward proof of possess- 
ing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration. 
If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which 
of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, 
interest, and admiration of mankind, — would most, therefore, 
show the evidences of having possessed greatness, — the England 
of the last twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time 
of splendid spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our indus- 
trial operations depending on coal, were very little developed ? 
Well, then, what an unsound habit of mind it must be which 
makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the great- 
ness of England, and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on 
seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this 
kind and fixing standards of perfection that are real ! 

Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works for 
material advantage are directed, — the commonest of common- 
places tells us how men are always apt to regard wealth as a pre- 
cious end in itself ; and certainly they have never been so apt 
thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time. 
Never did people believe anything more firmly than nine English- 
men out of ten at the present day beUeve that our greatness and 
welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the use of 
culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of 
perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to 
say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, 
but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this 
purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole 
world, the future as well as the present, would ine\dtably belong 
to the Philistines.^ The people who believe most that our great- 

^ With Arnold a term of reproach for uncultured and commonplace 
people. The Philistines of the Old Testament were the traditional enemies 
of the "chosen people." Hence the nineteenth-century application of the 



lO MATTHEW ARNOLD 

ness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most 
give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very 
people whom we call Philistines. Culture says : " Consider these 
people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the 
very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe 
the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, 
the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts 
which make the furniture of their minds ; would any amount of 
wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to be- 
come just like these people by having it ? " And thus culture 
begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in 
stemming the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and 
industrial community, and which saves the future, as one may 
hope, from being vulgarized, even if it cannot save the present. 

Population, again, and bodily health and vigor, are things 
which are nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, 
exaggerated way as in England. Both are really machinery ; yet 
how many people all around us do we see rest in them and fail 
to look beyond them ! Why, one has heard people, fresh from 
reading certain articles of the Times on the Registrar-General's 
returns of marriages and births in this country, who would talk 
of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if they 
had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in 
them ; as if the British Philistine would have only to present 
himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order 
to be received among the sheep as a matter of right ! 

But bodily health and vigor, it may be said, are not to be 
classed with wealth and population as mere machinery; they 
have a more real and essential value. True ; but only as they 
are more intimately connected with a perfect spiritual condition 
than wealth or population are. The moment we disjoin them 
from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, 
as we do pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in them- 
selves, our worship of them becomes as mere worship of machin- 

name to the enemies of culture : those whose interests were limited by 
narrow and material aims. — Editors. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT ii 

ery, as our worship of wealth or population, and as unintelligent 
and vulgarizing a worship as that is. Every one with anything 
like an adequate idea of human perfection has distinctly marked 
this subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation 
of bodily vigor and activity. "Bodily exercise profiteth little; 
but godliness is profitable unto all things," says the author of the 
Epistle to Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says just as 
explicitly: "Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the 
constitution of thy body, in reference to the services of the mind.^^ 
But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human per- 
fection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this per- 
fection, as religion or utilitarianism assigns to it, a special and 
limited character, this point of view, I say, of culture is best 
given by these words of Epictetus : "It is a sign of d<^vta," says 
he, — that is, of a nature not finely tempered, — "to give your- 
selves up to things which relate to the body ; to make, for in- 
stance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a 
great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great 
fuss about riding. All these things ought to be done merely by 
the way : the formation of the spirit and character must be our 
real concern." This is admirable ; and, indeed, the Greek word 
€V(f>via, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of 
perfection as culture brings us to conceive it : a harmonious per- 
fection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and in- 
telligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of 
things," — as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had him- 
self all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, 
— "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.'' The ev^uT^s is 
the man who tends towards sweetness and light ; the a^w/s, on 
the other hand, is our Philistine. The immense spiritual signifi- 
cance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this 
central and happy idea of the essential character of human per- 
fection ; and Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, as a smatter- 
ing of Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this wonderful 
significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of 
our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it. 



12 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of per- 
fection, culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with 
poetry. Far more than on our freedom, our population, and our 
industrialism, many amongst us rely upon our religious organi- 
zations to save us. I have called religion a yet more important 
manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has 
worked on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses 
of men. But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect 
on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and 
invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the 
idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of 
a human nature perfect on the moral side, — which is the 
dominant idea of religion, — has been enabled to have ; and 
it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout 
energy, to transform and govern the other. 

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and 
poetry are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human 
nature perfect on all sides adds to itself a religious and devout 
energy, and works in the strength of that, is on this account of 
such surpassing interest and instructiveness for us, though it was, 
— as, having regard to the human race in general, and, indeed, 
having regard to the Greeks themselves, we must own, — a pre- 
mature attempt, an attempt which for success needed the moral 
and religious fiber in humanity to. be more braced and developed 
than it had yet been. But Greece did not err in having the idea 
of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection so present 
and paramount. It is impossible to have this idea too present 
and paramount ; only, the moral fiber must be braced too. And 
we, because we have braced the moral fiber, are not on that 
account in the right way, if at the same time the idea of beauty, 
harmony, and complete human perfection is wanting or misappre- 
hended amongst us ; and evidently it w wanting or misapprehended 
at present. And when we rely as we do on our religious organiza- 
tions, which in themselves do not and cannot give us this idea, and 
think we have done enough if we make them spread and prevail, 
then I say we fall into our common fault of overvaluing machinery. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 13 

Nothing is more common than for people to confound the 
inward peace and satisfaction which follows the subduing of the 
obvious faults of our animality with what I may call absolute in- 
ward peace and satisfaction, — the peace and satisfaction which 
are reached as we draw near to complete spiritual perfec- 
tion, and not merely to moral perfection, or rather to relative 
moral perfection. No people in the world have done more and 
struggled more to attain this relative moral perfection than our 
English race has. For no people in the world has the command 
to resist the devil, to overcome the wicked one, in the nearest and 
most obvious sense of those words, had such a pressing force and 
reality. And we have had our reward, not only in the great 
worldly prosperity which our obedience to this command has 
brought us, but also, and far more, in great inward peace and 
satisfaction. But to me few things are more pathetic than to see 
people, on the strength of the inward peace and satisfaction 
which their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have brought 
them, employ, concerning their incomplete perfection and the 
religious organizations within which they have found it, language 
which properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far- 
off echo of the human soul's prophecy of it. Religion itself, I 
need hardly say, supplies them in abundance with this grand lan- 
guage. And very freely do they use it ; yet it is really the sever- 
est possible criticism of such an incomplete perfection as alone we 
have yet reached through our religious organizations. 

The impulse of the English race towards moral development 
and self-conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as 
in Puritanism. Nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an 
expression as in the religious organization of the Independents. 
The modern Independents have a newspaper, the Nonconformist, 
written with great sincerity and ability. The motto, the stand- 
ard, the profession of faith, which this organ of theirs carries 
aloft, is: "The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of 
the Protestant religion." There is sweetness and light, and an 
ideal of complete harmonious human perfection ! One need not 
go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it. Religion, 



14 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

with its instinct for perfection, supplies language to judge it, lan- 
guage, too, which is in our mouths every day. "Finally, be of 
one mind, united in feeling," says St. Peter. There is an ideal 
which judges the Puritan ideal : "The Dissidence of Dissent and 
the Protestantism of the Protestant religion!" And religious 
organizations like this are what people believe in, rest in, would 
give their lives for ! Such, I say, is the wonderful virtue of even 
the beginnings of perfection, of having conquered even the plain 
faults of our animality, that the religious organization which has 
helped us to do it can seem to us something precious, salutary, 
and to be propagated, even when it wears such a brand of im- 
perfection on its forehead as this. And men have got such a 
habit of giving to the language of religion a special application, 
of making it a mere jargon, that for the condemnation which 
religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious or- 
ganizations they have no ear ; they are sure to cheat themselves 
and to explain this condemnation away. They can only be 
reached by the criticism which culture, like poetry, speaking a 
language not to be sophisticated, and resolutely testing these 
organizations by the ideal of a human perfection complete on all 
sides, applies to them. 

But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and 
again failing, and failing conspicuously, in the necessary first 
stage to a harmonious perfection, in the subduing of the great ob- 
vious faults of our animality, which it is the glory of these reli- 
gious organizations to have helped us to subdue. True, they do 
often so fail. They have often been without the virtues as 
well as the faults of the Puritan ; it has been one of their dangers 
that they so felt the Puritan's faults that they too much neg- 
lected the practice of his virtues. I will not, however, excul- 
pate them at the Puritan's expense. They have often failed in 
morality, and morality is indispensable. And they have been 
punished for their failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for 
his performance. They have been punished wherein they erred ; 
but their ideal of beauty, of sweetness and light, and a human 
nature complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of per- 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 15 

fection still ; just as the Puritan's ideal of perfection remains 
narrow and inadequate, although for what he did well he has been 
richly rewarded. Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pil- 
grim Fathers' voyage, they and their standard of perfection are 
rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakespeare or Virgil, 
— souls in whom sweetness and light, and all that in human 
nature is most humane, were eminent, — accompanying them on 
their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakespeare 
and Virgil would have found them ! In the same way let us 
judge the religious organizations which we see all around us. 
Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which they have 
accomplished ; but do not let us fail to see clearly that their 
idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that 
the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protest- 
ant religion will never bring humanity to its true goal. As I 
said with regard to wealth : Let us look at the life of those 
who live in and for it, — so I say with regard to the religious 
organizations. Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as 
the Nonconformist, — a life of jealousy of the Establishment, 
disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons ; and then 
think of it as an ideal of a human life completing itself on all 
sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and 
perfection ! 

Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one 
of the religious organizations of this country, was a short time ago 
giving an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of 
all the vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd ; 
and then the writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Hux- 
ley, and asked him how he proposed to cure all this vice and 
hideousness without religion. I confess I felt disposed to ask the 
asker this question : and how do you propose to cure it with such 
a religion as yours ? How is the ideal of a life so unlovely, so 
unattractive, so incomplete, so narrow, so far removed from a 
true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is the life of your 
religious organization as you yourself image it, to conquer and 
transform all this vice and hideousness ? Indeed, the strongest 



1 6 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the clearest 
proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection held by 
the religious organizations, — expressing, as I have said, the most 
widespread effort which the human race has yet made after per- 
fection, — is to be found in the state of our life and society with 
these in possession of it, and having been in possession of it I 
know not how many hundred years. We are all of us included in 
some religious organization or other ; we all call ourselves, in the 
sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before 
noticed, children of God. Children of God ; — it is an immense pre- 
tension ! — and how are we to justify it ? .By the works which 
we do, and the words which we speak. And the work which we 
collective children of God do, our grand center of life, our city 
which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London ! London, 
with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal 
canker of publice egestas, privatim opulentia,^ — to use the words 
which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome, — unequalled 
in the world ! The word, again, which we children of God speak, 
the voice which most hits our collective thought, the newspaper 
with the largest circulation in England, nay, with the largest cir- 
culation in the whole world, is the Daily Telegraph ! I say that 
when our religious organizations, — which I admit to express 
the most considerable effort after perfection that our race has yet 
made, — land us in no better result than this, it is high time to 
examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see whether it does 
not leave out of account sides and forces of human nature which 
we might turn to great use ; whether it would not be more opera- 
tive if it were more complete. And I say that the English reli- 
ance on our religious organizations and on their ideas of human 
perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on 
muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth, — mere 
belief in machinery, and unfruitful ; and that it is wholesomely 
counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and 
on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, a har- 
monious perfection. 

1 Public want and private wealth. — Editors. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 17 

Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, 
its desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its 
freedom from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machin- 
ery, even while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing 
the mischief men do themselves by their blind belief in some 
machinery or other, — whether it is wealth and industrialism, or 
whether it is the cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or 
whether it is a political organization, — or whether it is a reli- 
gious organization, — oppose with might and main the tendency 
to this or that political and religious organization, or to games 
and athletic exercises, or to wealth and industrialism, and try 
violently to stop it. But the flexibility which sweetness and 
light give, and which is one of the rewards of culture pursued in 
good faith, enables a man to see that a tendency may be neces- 
sary, and even, as a preparation for something in the future, salu- 
tary, and yet that the generations or individuals who obey this 
tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of the hope of 
perfection by following it ; and that its mischiefs are to be criti- 
cized, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it has 
served its purpose. 

Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech at Paris, — and 
others have pointed out the same thing, — how necessary is the 
present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in 
order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the 
society of the future. The worst of these justifications is that 
they are generally addressed to the very people engaged, body 
and soul, in the movement in question ; at all events, that they 
are always seized with the greatest avidity by these people, and 
taken by them as quite justifying their life ; and that thus they 
tend to harden them in their sins. Now, culture admits the ne- 
cessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated 
industrialism, readily allows that the future may derive benefit 
from it; but insists, at the same time, that the passing genera- 
tions of industrialists, — forming, for the most part, the stout 
main body of PhiHstinism, — are sacrificed to it. In the same 
way, the result of all the games and sports which occupy the pass- 



1 8 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

ing generation of boys and young men may be the establishment 
of a better and sounder physical type for the future to work with. 
Culture does not set itself against the games and sports ; it con- 
gratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its 
improved physical basis ; but it points out that our passing 
generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed. 
Puritanism was perhaps necessary to develop the moral fiber of 
the English race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiasti- 
cal domination over men's minds and to prepare the way for free- 
dom of thought in the distant future; still, culture points out 
that the harmonious perfection of generations of Puritans and 
Nonconformists has been, in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom 
of speech may be necessary for the society of the future, but the 
young lions of the Daily Telegraph in the meanwhile are sacrificed. 
A voice for every man in his country's government may be nec- 
essary for the society of the future, but meanwhile Mr. Beales 
and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed. 

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults ; and she has 
heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon 
the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the 
beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to 
seize one truth, — the truth that beauty and sweetness are 
essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I 
insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say 
boldly that this, our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our 
sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bot- 
tom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our op- 
position to so many triumphant movements. And the senti- 
ment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown 
its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political 
battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped 
our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with 
the modern world ; but we have told silently upon the mind of 
the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our 
adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up our 
own communications with the future. Look at the course of the 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 19 

great movement ^ which shook Oxford to its center some thirty- 
years ago ! It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. New- 
man's Apology ' may see, against what in one word may be called 
"Liberalism." Liberalism prevailed; it was the appointed 
force to do the work of the hour ; it was necessary, it was inevi- 
table, that it should prevail. The Oxford movement was broken, 
. it failed ; our wrecks are scattered on every shore : — 

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? 

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it 
really broke the Oxford movement ? It was the great middle- 
class liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief 
the Reform Bill of 1832, and local self-government, in politics ; in 
the social sphere, free trade, unrestricted competition, and the 
making of large industrial fortunes ; in the religious sphere, the 
Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant 
religion. I do not say that other and more intelligent forces than 
this were not opposed to the Oxford movement : but this was the 
force which really beat it ; this was the force which Dr. Newman 
felt himself fighting with ; this was the force which till only the 
other day seemed to be the paramount force in this country, and 
to be in possession of the future ; this was the force whose achieve- 
ments fill Mr. Lowe with such inexpressible admiration, and 
whose rule he was so horror-struck to see threatened. And where 
is this great force of Philistinism now? It is thrust into the 
second rank; it is become a power of yesterday, it has lost the 
future. A new power has suddenly appeared, a power which it 
is impossible yet to judge fully, but which is certainly a wholly 
different force from middle-class liberalism ; different in its cardi- 
nal points of belief, different in its tendencies in every sphere. It 

' The Oxford or Tractarian Movement, which began at Oxford in 1833 
under the leadership of John Henry (afterwards Cardinal) Newman, and 
John Keble, had as its object the intensifying of religious faith and the 
revival of ecclesiastical and ceremonial tradition in the Church of 
England. — Editors. 

^ Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, an explanation of his conversion to 
the Roman Church. — Editors. 



20 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

loves and admires neither the legislation of middle-class Parlia- 
ments, nor the local self-government of middle-class vestries, nor 
the unrestricted competition of middle-class industrialists, nor 
the Dissidence of middle-class Dissent and the Protestantism 
of middle-class Protestant religion. I am not now praising this 
new force, or saying that its own ideals are better ; all I say is, 
that they are wholly different. And who will estimate how much 
the currents of feeling created by Dr. Newman's movements, the 
keen desire for beauty and sweetness which it nourished, the deep 
aversion it manifested to the hardness and vulgarity of middle- 
class liberalism, the strong light it turned on the hideous and 
grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism, — who will 
estimate how much all these contributed to swell the tide of 
secret dissatisfaction which has niined the ground under the self- 
confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and has prepared 
the way for its sudden collapse and supersession ? It is in this 
manner that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness 
conquers, and in this manner long may it continue to conquer ! 
In this manner it works to the same end as culture, and there 
is plenty of work for it yet to do. I have said that the new and 
more democratic force which is now superseding our old middle- 
class liberalism cannot yet be rightly judged. It has its main 
tendencies still to form. We hear promises of its giving us admin- 
istrative reform, law reform, reform of education, and I know not 
what ; but those promises come rather from its advocates, wish- 
ing to make a good plea for it and to justify it for superseding 
middle-class liberalism, than from clear tendencies which it has 
itself yet developed. But meanwhile it has plenty of well-in- 
tentioned friends against whom culture may ^\ith advantage con- 
tinue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection ; that this 
is an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased 
sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy. Mr. 
Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class 
liberalism and the world of democracy, but who brings most of 
his ideas from the world of middle-class liberalism in which he 
was bred, always inclines to inculcate that faith in machinery to 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 21 

which, as we have seen, Englishmen are so prone, and which has 
been the bane of middle-class liberalism. He complains with 
a sorrowful indignation of people who "appear to have no proper 
estimate of the value of the franchise" ; he leads his disciples to 
believe, — what the Englishman is always too ready to believe, — 
that the having a vote, like the having a large family, or a large 
business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and perfect- 
ing effect upon human nature. Or else he cries out to the democ- 
racy, — "the men," as he calls them, "upon whose shoulders 
the greatness of England rests," — he cries out to them: "See 
what you have done ! I look over this country and see the cities 
you have built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures 
you have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the 
greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen ! I see that 
you have converted by your labors what was once a wilderness, 
these islands, into a fruitful garden ; I know that you have cre- 
ated this wealth, and are a nation whose name is a word of 
power throughout all the world." Why, this is just the very 
style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck or Mr. Lowe de- 
bauches the minds of the middle classes, and makes such Philis- 
tines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to value 
himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and 
light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or 
the bigness of the tabernacle he has built. Only the middle 
classes are told they have done it all with their energy, self-reli- 
ance, and capital, and the democracy are told they have done it 
all with their hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to 
put its trust in achievements of this kind is merely training them 
to be Philistines to take the place of the Philistines whom they 
are superseding; and they too, like the middle class, will be 
encouraged to sit down at the banquet of the future without hav- 
ing on a wedding garment, and nothing excellent can then come 
from them. Those who know their, besetting faults, those who 
have watched them and listened to them, or those who will read 
the instructive account recently given of them by one of them- 
selves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the idea which 



22 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

culture sets before us of perfection, — an increased spiritual activ- 
ity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased light, 
increased life, increased sympathy, — is an idea which the new 
democracy needs far more than the idea of the blessedness of the 
franchise or the wonderfulness of its own industrial performances. 
Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it, 
not in the old ruts of middle-class Philistinism, but in ways 
which are naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in 
this country they are novel and untried ways. I may call them 
the ways of Jacobinism.^ Violent indignation with the past, ab- 
stract systems of renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine 
drawn up in black and white for elaborating down to the very 
smallest details a rational society for the future, — these are the 
ways of Jacobinism. Mr. Frederic Harrison and other disciples 
of Comte,^ — one of them, Mr. Congreve, is an old acquaintance of 
mine and I am glad to have an opportunity of publicly expressing 
my respect for his talents and character, — are among the friends 
of democracy who are for leading it in paths of this kind. Mr. 
Frederic Harrison is very hostile to culture, and from a natural 
enough motive ; for culture is the eternal opponent of the two 
things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism, — its fierceness, 
and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is always as- 
signing to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent 
of human destiny than their friends like. A current in people's 
minds sets towards new ideas ; people are dissatisfied with their 
old narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any 
other; and some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the 
real merit of having early and strongly felt and helped the new 
current, but who brings plenty of narrowness and mistakes of his 
own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the 
author of the whole current, the fit person to be intrusted with 
its regulation and to guide the human race. 

^ Violent radicalism. The Jacobin party played an aggressive part in 
the French Revolution. — Editors. 

^ Auguste Comte, the founder of the " Positivist " philosophy, who paid 
an exalted deference to the importance of public opinion. — Editors. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 23 

The excellent German historian of the mythology of Rome, 
Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under the Tarquins of 
the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and reconcilia- 
tion, will have us observe that it was not so much the Tarquins 
who brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a current 
in the mind of the Roman people which set powerfully at that 
time towards a new worship of this kind, and away from the old 
run of Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a similar way, cul- 
ture directs our attention to the natural current there is in human 
affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let us rivet our 
faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us see not 
only his good side, but also how much in him was of necessity 
limited and transient ; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a sense of an 
increased freedom and of an ampler future, in so doing. 

I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to 
which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was 
the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most 
considerable, it seems to me, whom America has yet produced, — 
Benjamin Franklin, — I remember the relief with which, after 
long feeling the sway of Franklin's imperturbable common-sense, 
I came upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of Job 
to replace the old version, the style of which, says Franklin, has 
become obsolete, and thence less agreeable. "I give," he con- 
tinues, "a few verses, which may serve as a sample of the kind of 
version I would recommend." We all recollect the famous verse 
in our translation : "Then Satan answered the Lord and said : 
'Doth Job fear God for nought?'" Franklin makes this: 
"Does your Majesty imagine that Job's good conduct is the 
effect of mere personal attachment and affection?" I well 
remember how, when first I read that, I drew a deep breath of 
reHef, and said to myself: "After all, there is a stretch of 
humanity beyond Franklin's victorious good sense !" So, after 
hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern 
society, and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers 
of our future, I open the Deontology. There I read: "While 
Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geom- 



24 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

etry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretense 
of talking wisdom and morality. This morality of theirs con- 
sisted in words ; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters 
known to every man's experience." From the moment of 
reading that, I am delivered from the bondage of Bentham ! the 
fanaticism of his adherents can touch me no longer. I feel the 
inadequacy of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human 
society, for perfection. 

Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a system, of 
disciples, of a school ; with men like Comte, or the late Mr. 
Buckle, or Mr. Mill.^ However much it may find to admire in 
these personages, or in some of them, it nevertheless remembers 
the text : "Be not ye called Rabbi ! " and it soon passes on from 
any Rabbi. But Jacobinism loves a Rabbi ; it does not want 
to pass on from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and still unreached 
perfection ; it wants its Rabbi and its ideas to stand for perfec- 
tion, that they may with the more authority recast the world ; 
and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture, — eternally passing on- 
wards and seeking, — is an impertinence and an offense. But 
culture, just because it resists this tendency of Jacobinism to im- 
pose on us a man with limitations and errors of his own along 
with the true ideas of which he is the organ, really does the 
world and Jacobinism itself a service. 

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those 
whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with 
the inexhaustible indulgence proper to culture, the consideration 
of circumstances, the severe judgment of actions joined to the 
merciful judgment of persons. "The man of culture is in poli- 
tics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest mortals 
alive !" Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and 
he complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for 
small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." 
Of what use is culture, he asks, except for "a critic of new books 
or a professor of belles-lettres?" Why, it is of use because, in 
presence of the fierce exasperation which breathes, or rather, I 
' See p. 98. — Editors. 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 25 

may say, hisses through the whole production in which Mr. 
Frederic Harrison asks that question, it reminds us that the 
perfection of human nature is sweetness and Hght. It is of use 
because, Hke religion, — that other effort after perfection, — it 
testifies that, where bitter envying and strife are, there is con- 
fusion and every evil work. 

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and 
light. He who works for sweetness and light, works to make 
reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machin- 
ery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture 
looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred ; culture has one 
great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one 
even yet greater ! — the passion for making them prevail. It is 
not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man ; it knows that the 
sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until the raw 
and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness 
and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work 
for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying 
that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and 
light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted 
how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are 
the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flower- 
ing times for literature and art and all the creative power of 
genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when 
the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by 
thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must 
be real thought and real beauty ; real sweetness and real light. 
Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, 
an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think 
proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary 
popular literature is an example of this way of working on the 
masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses 
with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their 
own profession or party. Our religious and political organiza- 
tions give an example of this way of working on the masses. I 
condemn neither way ; but culture works differently. It does 



26 MATTHEW ARNOLD 

not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes ; it does not 
try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made 
judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes ; 
to make the best that has been thought and known in the world 
current everywhere ; to make all men live in an atmosphere of 
sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them 
itself, freely, — nourished, and not bound by them. 

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true 
apostles of equaUty. The great men of culture are those who 
have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying 
from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the 
best ideas of their time ; who have labored to divest knowledge 
of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, 
exclusive ; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique 
of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowl- 
edge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of 
sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard in the Middle 
Ages, in spite of all his imperfections ; and thence the bound- 
less emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were 
Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century ; 
and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably 
precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will 
accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of 
Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany ; and yet the 
names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence and 
enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters will 
hardly awaken. And why? Because they humanized knowl- 
edge ; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence ; 
because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, 
to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint Au- 
gustine they said : "Let us not leave thee alone to make in the 
secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the 
firmament, the division of light from darkness ; let the children 
of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine 
upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and an- 
nounce the revolution of the times ; for the old order is passed, 



SWEETNESS AND LIGHT 27 

and the new arises ; the night is spent, the day is come forth ; 
and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt 
send forth laborers into thy harvest sown by other hands than 
theirs ; when thou shalt send forth new laborers to new seed- 
times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet." 



11 

SCIENCE AND CULTURE 
Thomas Henry Huxley 

[Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) is to be remembered among the 
great men of the Victorian era who contributed most to human progress 
and knowledge. As a professional scientist he made invaluable contribu- 
tions to research ; as a champion of Darwinism he greatly strengthened the 
foundations of the evolutionary theory; as an educator he completely 
revolutionized existing methods of scientific teaching ; and as a public lec- 
turer he did much to popularize the facts of modern science. Most of his 
writing centers in his two chief interests, scientific exposition and the prob- 
lem of education, and is characterized by a directness of thought and a lucid- 
ity of style perhaps unsurpassed in the whole range of English prose. A 
typical Darwinian essay appears elsewhere in this volume. 

The following lecture on Science and Culture has been selected as 
expressly directed against the well-known educational views of Matthew 
Arnold. Huxley's arguments for the cultural and educational value of 
science as opposed to that of the humanities, it may be noticed, are 
reiterated by present-day champions of science in discussions over this 
still vexing and far from settled question. A classical education, it is 
maintained, while an excellent thing for some, is a waste of time for the 
practical minded; and, moreover, real culture may be acquired Just as 
effectively by an exclusively scientific education as by an equally restricted 
literary education. For the continuation of this debate between Huxley 
and Arnold, the student is referred to Arnold's Literature and Science (Dis- 
courses in America, 1885). 

Science and Culture was delivered as an address at the opening of Sir 
Josiah Mason's Science College, at Birmingham, October i, 1880.] 

Six years ago, as some of my present hearers may remember, 
I had the privilege of addressing a large assemblage of the in- 
habitants of this city, who had gathered together to do honor 
to the memory of their famous townsman, Joseph Priestley; 
and, if any satisfaction attaches to posthumous glory, we may 

28 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 29 

hope that the manes of the burnt-out philosopher were then 
finally appeased. 

No man, however, who is endowed with a fair share of com- 
mon sense, and not more than a fair share of vanity, will identify 
either contemporary or posthumous fame with the highest 
good ; and Priestley's life leaves no doubt that he, at any rate, 
set a much higher value upon the advancement of knowledge, 
and the promotion of that freedom of thought which is at once 
the cause and the consequence of intellectual progress. 

Hence I am disposed to think that, if Priestley could be 
amongst us to-day, the occasion of our meeting would afford 
him even greater pleasure than the proceedings which cele- 
brated the centenary of his chief discovery. The kindly heart 
would be moved, the high sense of social duty would be satisfied, 
by the spectacle of well-earned wealth, neither squandered in 
tawdry luxury and vainglorious show, nor scattered with the 
careless charity which blesses neither him that gives nor him 
that takes, but expended in the execution of a well-considered 
plan for the aid of present and future generations of those who 
are willing to help themselves. 

We shall all be of one mind thus far. But it is needful to share 
Priestley's keen interest in physical science ; and to have learned, 
as he had learned, the value of scientific training in fields of 
inquiry apparently far remote from physical science ; in order 
to appreciate, as he would have appreciated, the value of the 
noble gift which Sir Josiah Mason has bestowed upon the inhab- 
itants of the Midland district. 

For us children of the nineteenth century, however, the es- 
tablishment of a college under the conditions of Sir Josiah Ma- 
son's Trust, has a significance apart from any which it could 
have possessed a hundred years ago. It appears to be an in- 
dication that we are reaching the crisis of the battle, or rather 
of the long series of battles, which have been fought over educa- 
tion in a campaign which began long before Priestley's time, 
and will probably not be finished just yet. 

In the last century, the combatants were the champions of 



30 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

ancient literature, on the one side, and those of modern litera- 
ture on the other ; but, some thirty years ^ ago, the contest 
became complicated by the appearance of a third army, ranged 
round the banner of Physical Science. 

I am not aware that any one has authority to speak in the 
name of this new host. For it must be admitted to be some- 
what of a guerilla force, composed largely of irregulars, each of 
whom fights pretty much for his own hand. But the impres- 
sions of a full private, who has seen a good deal of service in 
the ranks, respecting the present position of affairs and the con- 
ditions of a permanent peace, may not be devoid of interest ; 
and I do not know that I could make a better use of the present 
opportunity than by laying them before you. 

From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical 
science into ordinary education was timidly whispered, until 
now, the advocates of scientific education have met with oppo- 
sition of two kinds. On the one hand, they have been pooh- 
poohed by the men of business who pride themselves on being 
the representatives of practicality; while, on the other hand, 
they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars, in 
their capacity of Le\dtes in charge of the ark of culture and 
monopolists of liberal education. 

The practical men believed that the idol whom they worship — 
rule of thumb — has been the source of the past prosperity, and 
will suffice for the future welfare of the arts and manufactures. 
They were of opinion that science is speculative rubbish; that 
theory and practice have nothing to do with one another ; and 
that the scientific habit of mind is an impediment, rather than 
an aid, in the conduct of ordinary affairs. 

I have used the past tense in speaking of the practical men — 
for although they were very formidable thirty years ago, I am 
not sure that the pure species has not been extirpated. In fact, 

1 The advocacy of the introduction of physical science into general edu- 
cation by George Combe and others commenced a good deal earlier; but 
the movement had acquired hardly any practical force before the time to 
which I refer. 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 31 

so far as mere argument goes, they have been subjected to such 
a Jeu d'enjer that it is a miracle if any have escaped. But I 
have remarked that your typical practical man has an unex- 
pected resemblance to one of Milton's angels. His spiritual 
wounds, such as are inflicted by logical weapons, may be as 
deep as a well and as wide as a church door, but beyond shedding 
a few drops of ichor, celestial or otherwise, he is no whit the 
worse. So, if any of these opponents be left, I will not waste 
time in vain repetition of the demonstrative evidence of the prac- 
tical value of science ; but knowing that a parable will some- 
times penetrate where syllogisms fail to effect an entrance, I mil 
offer a story for their consideration. 

Once upon a time, a boy, w^ith nothing to depend upon but his 
own vigorous nature, was thrown into the thick of the struggle 
for existence in the midst of a great manufacturing population. 
He seems to have had a hard fight, inasmuch as, by the time he 
was thirty years of age, his total disposable fu'nds amounted to 
twenty pounds. Nevertheless, middle life found him giving 
proof of his comprehension of the practical problems he had been 
roughly called upon to solve, by a career of remarkable prosperity. 

Finally, having reached old age, with its well-earned surround- 
ings of "honor, troops of friends," the hero of my story be- 
thought himself of those who were making a like start in life, 
and how he could stretch out a helping hand to them. 

After long and anxious reflection this successful practical man 
of business could devise nothing better than to provide them with 
the means of obtaining "sound, extensive, and practical scien- 
tific knowledge." And he devoted a large part of his wealth and 
five years of incessant work to this end. 

I need not point the moral of a tale which, as the solid and spa- 
cious fabric of the Scientific College assures us, is no fable, nor 
can anything which I can say intensify the force of this practical 
answer to practical objections. 

We may take it for granted, then, that, in the opinion of those 
best qualified to judge, the diffusion of thorough scientific edu- 
cation is an absolutely essential condition of industrial prog- 



32 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

ress ; and that the College which has been opened to-day will 
confer an inestimable boon upon those whose livelihood is to be 
gained by the practice of the arts and manufactures of the dis- 
trict. 

The only question worth discussion is, whether the conditions, 
under which the work of the College is to be carried out, are such 
as to give it the best possible chance of achieving permanent 
success. 

Sir Josiah Mason, without doubt most wisely, has left very 
large freedom of action to the trustees, to whom he proposes 
ultimately to commit the administration of the College, so that 
they may be able to adjust its arrangements in accordance with 
the changing conditions of the future. But, with respect to 
three points, he has laid most explicit injunctions upon both 
administrators and teachers. 

Party politics are forbidden to enter into the minds of either, so 
far as the work of 'the College is concerned ; theology is as sternly 
banished from its precincts ; and finally, it is especially declared 
that the College shall make no provision for "mere literary in- 
struction and education." 

It does not concern me at present to dwell upon the first two 
injunctions any longer than may be needful to express my full 
conviction of their wisdom. But the third prohibition brings us 
face to face with those other opponents of scientific education, 
who are by no means in the moribund condition of the practical 
man, but alive, alert, and formidable. 

It is not impossible that we shall hear this express exclusion of 
"literary instruction and education" from a College which, 
nevertheless, professes to give a high and efficient education, 
sharply criticized. Certainly the time was that the Levites of 
culture would have sounded their trumpets against its walls as 
against an educational Jericho. 

How often have we not been told that the study of physical 
science is incompetent to confer culture ; that it touches none of 
the higher problems of life ; and, what is worse, that the contin- 
ual devotion to scientific studies tends to generate a narrow and 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 33 

bigoted belief in the applicability of scientific methods to the 
search after truth of all kinds. How frequently one has reason 
to observe that no reply to a troublesome argument tells so well 
as calling its author a "mere scientific specialist." And, as I am 
afraid that it is not permissible to speak of this form of opposition 
to scientific education in the past tense, may we not expect to 
be told that this, not only omission, but prohibition, of "mere 
literary instruction and education " is a patent example of scien- 
tific narrow-mindedness ? 

I am not acquainted with Sir Josiah Mason's reasons for the 
action which he has taken ; but if, as I apprehend is the case, he 
refers to the ordinary classical course of our schools and universi- 
ties by the name of "mere literary instruction and education," 
I venture to offer sundry reasons of my own in support of that 
action. 

For I hold very strongly by two convictions: the first is, 
that neither the discipline nor the subject matter of classical 
education is of such direct value to the student of physical science 
as to justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either ; and 
the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an 
exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an ex- 
clusively literary education. 

I need hardly point out to you that these opinions, especially 
the latter, are diametrically opposed to those of the great majority 
of educated Englishmen, influenced as they are by school and 
university traditions. In their belief, culture is obtainable only 
by a liberal education ; and a liberal education is synonymous, 
not merely with education and instruction in literature, but in 
one particular form of literature; namely, that of Greek and 
Roman antiquity. They hold that the man who has learned 
Latin and Greek, however little, is educated ; while he who is 
versed in other branches of knowledge, however deeply, is a more 
or less respectable specialist, not admissable into the cultured 
caste. The stamp of the educated man, the University degree, is 
not for him. 

I am too well acquainted with the generous catholicity of 



34 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

spirit, the true sympathy with scientific thought, which pervades 
the writings of our chief apostle of culture, to identify him with 
t hese opinions ; and yet one may cull from one and another of 
those epistles to the Philistines,^ which so much delight all who 
do not answer to that name, sentences which lend them some 
support. 

Mr. Arnold tells us that the meaning of culture is "to know the 
best that has been thought and said in the world." It is the 
criticism of life contained in literature. That criticism re- 
gards "Europe as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, 
one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to 
a common result ; and whose members have, for their common 
outfit, a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, 
and of one another. Special, local, and temporary advantages 
being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intel- 
lectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most 
thoroughly carries out this program. And what is that but 
saying that we too all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly 
we carry it out, shall make the more progress ? " ^ 

We have here to deal with two distinct propositions. The 
first, that a criticism of life is the essence of culture ; the second, 
that literature contains the materials which suffice for the con- 
struction of such a criticism. 

I think that we must all assent to the first proposition. For 
culture certainly means something quite different from learning 
or technical skill. It implies the possession of an ideal, and the 
habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison 
with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should supply a com- 
plete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its 
possibilities and of its limitations. 

But we may agree to all this, and yet strongly dissent from the 
assumption that literature alone is competent to supply this 
knowledge. After having learnt all that Greek, Roman, and 

' See p. g. — Editors. 

^ The Function of Criticism at the Present Time; in Essays in Criticism, 
First Series (Macmillan) , p. 39. — Editors. 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 35 

Eastern antiquity have thought and said, and all that modern 
literatures have to tell us, it is not self-evident that we have laid 
a sufficiently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of 
life that constitutes culture. 

Indeed, to any one acquainted with the scope of physical 
science, it is not at all evident. Considering progress only in the 
"intellectual and spiritual sphere," I find myself wholly unable 
to admit that either nations or individuals will really advance, if 
their common outfit draws nothing from the stores of physical 
science. I should say that an army, without weapons of preci- 
sion, and with no particular base of operations, might more hope- 
fully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid 
of a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last cen- 
tury, upon a criticism of life. 

When a biologist meets with an anomaly, he instinctively 
turns to the study of development to clear it up. The rationale 
of contradictory opinions may with equal confidence be sought in 
history. 

It is, happily, no new thing that Englishmen should employ 
their wealth in building and endowing institutions for educa- 
tional purposes. But, five or six hundred years ago, deeds of 
foundation expressed or implied conditions as nearly as possible 
contrary to those which have been thought expedient by Sir 
Josiah Mason. That is to say, physical science was practically 
ignored, while a certain literary training was enjoined as a means 
to the acquirement of knowledge which was essentially theo- 
logical. 

The reason of this singular contradiction between the actions 
of men alike animated by a strong and disinterested desire to 
promote the welfare of their fellows, is easily discovered. 

At that time, in fact, if any one desired knowledge beyond 
such as could be obtained by his own observation, or by common 
conversation, his first necessity was to learn the Latin language, 
inasmuch as all the higher knowledge of the western world was 
contained in works written in that language. Hence, Latin 
grammar, with logic and rhetoric, studied through Latin, were 



36 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

the fundamentals of education. With respect to the substance 
of the knowledge imparted through this channel, the Jewish and 
Christian Scriptures, as interpreted and supplemented by the 
Romish Church, were held to contain a complete and infallibly 
true body of information. 

Theological dicta were, to the thinkers of those days, that 
which the axioms and definitions of Euclid are to the geometers 
of these. The business of the philosophers of the Middle Ages 
was to deduce from the data furnished by the theologians, con- 
clusions in accordance with ecclesiastical decrees. They were 
allowed the high privilege of showing, by logical process, how and 
why that which the Church said was true, must be true. And if 
their demonstrations fell short of or exceeded this limit, the 
Church was maternally ready to check their aberrations, if 
need be, by the help of the secular arm. 

Between the two, our ancestors were furnished with a compact 
and complete criticism of life. They were told how the world 
began, and how it would end ; they learned that all material ex- 
istence was but a base and insignificant blot upon the fair face of 
the spiritual world, and that nature was, to all intents and pur- 
poses, the playground of the devil ; they learned that the earth is 
the center of the visible universe, and that man is the cynosure of 
things terrestrial ; and more especially is it inculcated that the 
course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and con- 
stantly was, altered by the agency of innumerable spiritual beings, 
good and bad, according as they were moved by the deeds and 
prayers of men. The sum and substance of the whole doctrine 
was to produce the conviction that the only thing really worth 
knowing in this world was how to secure that place in a better 
which, under certain conditions, the Church promised. 

Our ancestors had a living belief in this theory of life, and acted 
upon it in their dealings with education, as in all other matters. 
Culture meant saintliness — after the fashion of the saints of 
those days ; the education that led to it was, of necessity, theo- 
logical ; and the way to theology lay through Latin. 

That the study of nature — further than was requisite for the 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 37 

satisfaction of everyday wants — should have any bearing on 
human Hfe was far from the thoughts of men thus trained. In- 
deed, as nature had been cursed for man's sake, it was an obvious 
conclusion that those who meddled with nature were likely to 
come into pretty close contact with Satan. And, if any born 
scientific investigator followed his instincts, he might safely 
reckon upon earning the reputation, and probably upon suffering 
the fate, of a sorcerer. 

Had the western world been left to itself in Chinese isolation, 
there is no saying how long this state of things might have en- 
dured. But, happily, it was not left to itself. Even earlier than 
the thirteenth century, the development of Moorish civilization 
in Spain and the great movement of the Crusades had introduced 
the leaven which, from that day to this, has never ceased to work. 
At first, through the intermediation of Arabic translations, after- 
wards, by the study of the originals, the western nations of 
Europe became acquainted with the writings of the ancient phi- 
losophers and poets, and, in time, with the whole of the vast lit- 
erature of antiquity. 

Whatever there was of high intellectual aspiration or dominant 
capacity in Italy, France, Germany, and England, spent itself 
for centuries in taking possession of the rich inheritance left by 
the dead civilizations of Greece and Rome. Marvelously aided 
by the invention of printing, classical learning spread and flour- 
ished. Those who possessed it prided themselves on having 
attained the highest culture then within the reach of man- 
kind. 

And justly. For, saving Dante on his solitary pinnacle, there 
was no figure in modern literature at the time of the Renascence 
to compare with the men of antiquity ; there was no art to com- 
pete with their sculpture; there was no physical science but 
that which Greece had created. Above all, there was no other 
example of perfect intellectual freedom — of the unhesitating 
acceptance of reason as the sole guide of truth and the supreme 
arbiter of conduct. 

The new learning necessarily soon exerted a profound influ- 



38 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

ence upon education. The language of the monks and school- 
men seemed little better than gibberish to scholars fresh from 
Virgil and Cicero, and the study of Latin was placed upon a new 
foundation. Moreover, Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key- 
to knowledge. The student who sought the highest thought of 
antiquity, found only a second-hand reflection of it in Roman 
literature, and turned his face to the full light of the Greeks. And 
after a battle, not altogether dissimilar to that which is at present 
being fought over the teaching of physical science, the study of 
Greek was recognized as an essential element of all higher educa- 
tion. 

Thus the Humanists,^ as they were called, won the day ; and 
the great reform which they effected was of incalculable service to 
mankind. But the Nemesis of all reformers is finality ; and the re- 
formers of education, like those of religion, fell into the profound, 
however common, error of mistaking the beginning for the end of 
the work of reformation. 

The representatives of the Humanists, in the nineteenth cen- 
tury, take their stand upon classical education as the sole avenue 
to culture, as firmly as if we were still in the age of the Renascence. 
Yet, surely, the present intellectual relations of the modern and 
the ancient worlds are profoundly different from those which 
obtained three centuries ago. Leaving aside the existence of a 
great and characteristically modern literature, of modern paint- 
ing, and, especially, of modern music, there is one feature of the 
present state of the civilized world which separates it more 
widely from the Renascence than the Renascence was separated 
from the Middle Ages. 

This distinctive character of our own times lies in the vast 
and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowl- 
edge. Not only is our daily life shaped by it, not only does the 
prosperity of millions of men depend upon it, but our whole 
theory of life has long been influenced, consciously or uncon- 

' So named because they considered that human interests could be 
better promoted by the study of the ancient classics (litterae humaniorcs) 
than by the theology of the medieval churchmen. — Editors. 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 39 

sciously, by the general conceptions of the universe, which have 
been forced upon us by physical science. 

In fact, the most elementary acquaintance with the results of 
scientific investigation shows us that they offer a broad and strik- 
ing contradiction to the opinions so implicitly credited and taught 
in the Middle Ages. 

The notions of the beginning and the end of the world enter- 
tained by our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very cer- 
tain that the earth is not the chief body in the material universe, 
and that the world is not subordinated to man's use. It is even 
more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order with 
which nothing interferes, and that the chief business of mankind 
is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly. More- 
over this scientific "criticism of life" presents itself to us with 
different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, 
nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. 
It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or 
less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth 
not among words but among things. It warns us that the asser- 
tion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime. 

The purely classical education advocated by the representa- 
tives of the Humanists in our day gives no inkling of all this. 
A man may be a better scholar than Erasmus, and know no more 
of the chief causes of the present intellectual fermentation than 
Erasmus did. Scholarly and pious persons, worthy of all respect, 
favor us with allocutions upon the sadness of the antagonism of 
science to the medieval way of thinking, which betray an igno- 
rance of the first principles of scientific investigation, an incapac- 
ity for understanding what a man of science means by veracity, 
and an unconsciousness of the weight of established scientific 
truths, which is almost comical. 

There is no great force in the tu quoque^ argument, or else the 
advocates of scientific education might fairly enough retort upon 
the modern Humanists that they may be learned specialists, but 

1 " Thou too ! " The retort which turns an adversary's argument 
against himself. — Editors. 



40 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

that they possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of Hfe 
as deserves the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were dis- 
posed to be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have brought 
this reproach upon themselves, not because they are too full of 
the spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they lack it. 

The period of the Renascence is commonly called that of the 
"Revival of Letters," as if the influences then brought to bear 
upon the mind of Western Europe had been wholly exhausted in 
the field of literature. I think it is very commonly forgotten 
that the revival of science, effected by the same agency, although 
less conspicuous, was not less momentous. 

In fact, the few and scattered students of nature of that day 
picked up the clew to her secrets exactly as it fell from the hands 
of the Greeks a thousand years before. The foundations of 
mathematics were so well laid by them that our children learn 
their geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria 
two thousand years ago.^ Modern astronomy is the natural con- 
tinuation and development of the work of Hipparchus and of 
Ptolemy ; modern physics of that of Democritus and of Archi- 
medes ; it was long before modern biological science outgrew the 
knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by Theophrastus, and 
by Galen. 

We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of the 
Greeks unless we know what they thought about natural phe- 
nomena. We cannot fully apprehend their criticism of life un- 
less we understand the extent to which that criticism was affected 
by scientific conceptions. We falsely pretend to be the inheri- 
tors of their culture unless we are penetrated, as the best minds 
among them were, with an unhesitating faith that the free em- 
ployment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the 
■sole method of reaching truth. 

Thus I venture to think that the pretensions of our modern 

Humanists to the possession of the monoply of culture and to the 

exclusive inheritance of the spirit of antiquity must be abated, if 

not abandoned. But I should be very sorry that anything I 

^ Euclid's treatise on geometry. — Editors. 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 41 

have said should be taken to imply a desire on my part to depre- 
ciate the value of classical education, as it might be and as it 
sometimes is. The native capacities of mankind vary no less 
than their opportunities ; and while culture is one, the road by 
which one man may best reach it is wholly different from that 
which is most advantageous to another. Again, while scientific 
education is yet inchoate and tentative, classical education is 
thoroughly well organized upon the practical experience of genera- 
tions of teachers. So that, given ample time for learning and 
destination for ordinary life, or for a literary career, I do not 
think that a young Englishman in search of culture can do better 
than follow the course usually marked out for him, supplement- 
ing its deficiencies by his own efforts. 

But for those who mean to make- science their serious occupa- 
tion ; or who intend to follow the profession of medicine ; or who 
have to enter early upon the business of life ; for all these, in my 
opinion, classical education is a mistake ; and it is for this reason 
that I am glad to see "mere literary education and instruc- 
tion" shut out from the curriculum of Sir Josiah Mason's Col- 
lege, seeing that its inclusion would probably lead to the in- 
troduction of the ordinary smattering of Latin and Greek. 

Nevertheless, I am the last person to question the importance 
of genuine literary education, or to suppose that intellectual cul- 
ture can be complete without it. An exclusively scientific train- 
ing will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusively 
literary training. The value of the cargo does not compensate 
for a ship's being out of trim ; and I should be very sorry to 
think that the Scientific College would turn out none but lop- 
sided men. 

There is no need, however, that such a catastrophe should 
happen. Instruction in English, French, and German is pro- 
vided, and thus the three greatest literatures of the modern world 
are made accessible to the student. 

French and German, and especially the latter language, are 
absolutely indispensable to those who desire full knowledge in 
any department of science. But even supposing that the knowl- 



42 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

edge of these languages acquired is not more than sufficient for 
purely scientific purposes, every Englishman has, in his native 
tongue, an almost perfect instrument of literary expression ; and, 
in his own literature, models of every kind of literary excellence. 
If an Englishman cannot get Hterary culture out of his Bible, his 
Shakespeare, his Milton, neither, in my belief, will the profoundest 
study of Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, give it to him. 

Thus, since the constitution of the College makes sufficient pro- 
vision for literary as well as for scientific education, and since 
artistic instruction is also contemplated, it seems to me that a 
fairly complete culture is offered to all who are willing to take 
advantage of it. 

But I am not sure that at this point the "practical" man, 
scotched but not slain, may ask what all this talk about culture 
has to do with an Institution, the object of which is defined to be 
" to promote the prosperity of the manufactures and the industry 
of the country." He may suggest that what is wanted for this 
end is not culture, not even a purely scientific discipline, but 
simply a knowledge of applied science. 

I often wish that this phrase, "applied science," had never been 
invented. For it suggests that there is a sort of scientific knowl- 
edge of direct practical use, which can be studied apart from 
another sort of scientific knowledge, which is of no practical util- 
ity, and which is termed "pure science." But there is no more 
complete fallacy than this. What people call applied science is 
nothing but the application of pure science to particular classes 
of problems. It consists of deductions from those general prin- 
ciples, established by reasoning and observation, which consti- 
tute pure science. No one can safely make these deductions 
until he has a firm grasp of the principles ; and he can obtain 
that grasp only by personal experience of the operations of ob- 
servation and of reasoning on which they are founded. 

.\lmost all the processes employed in the arts and manufac- 
tures fall within the range either of physics or of chemistry. In 
order to improve them, one must thoroughly understand them ; 
and no one has a chance of really understanding them, unless he 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 43 

has obtained that mastery of principles and that habit of dealing 
with facts which is given by long-continued and well-directed 
purely scientific training in the physical and the chemical labora- 
tory. So that there really is no question as to the necessity of 
purely scientific discipline, even if the work of the College were 
limited by the narrowest interpretation of its stated aims. 

And, as to the desirableness of a wider culture than that 
yielded by science alone, it is to be recollected that the improve- 
ment of manufacturing processes is only one of the conditions 
which contribute to the prosperity of industry. Industry is a 
means and not an end ; and mankind work only to get something 
which they want. What that something is depends partly on 
their innate, and partly on their acquired, desires. 

If the wealth resulting from prosperous industry is to be spent 
upon the gratification of unworthy desires, if the increasing per- 
fection of manufacturing processes is to be accompanied by an 
increasing debasement of those who carry them on, I do not see 
the good of industry and prosperity. 

Now it is perfectly true that men's views of what is desirable 
depend upon their characters ; and that the innate proclivities 
to which we give that name are not touched by any amount of 
instruction. But it does not follow that even mere intellectual 
education may not, to an indefinite extent, modify the practical 
manifestation of the characters of men in their actions, by suf)- 
plying them with motives unknown to the ignorant. A pleas- 
ure-loving character will have pleasure of some sort ; but, if 
you give him the choice, he may prefer pleasures which do not 
degrade him to those which do. And this choice is offered to 
every man who possesses in literary or artistic culture a never- 
failing source of pleasures, which are neither withered by age, 
nor staled by custom, nor embittered in the recollection by the 
pangs of self-reproach. 

If the Institution opened to-day fulfills the intention of its 
founder, the picked intelligences among all classes of the popula- 
tion of this district will pass through it. No child born in Bir- 
mingham, henceforward, if he have the capacity to profit by the 



44 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

opportunities oflFered to him, first in the primary and other 
schools and afterwards in the Scientific College, need fail to ob- 
tain, not merely the instruction, but the culture most appropri- 
ate to the conditions of his life. 

Within these walls, the future employer and the future artisan 
may sojourn together for a while, and carry, through all their 
lives, the stamp of the influences then brought to bear upon them. 
Hence, it is not beside the mark to remind you, that the pros- 
perity of industry depends not merely upon the improvement of 
manufacturing processes, not merely upon the ennobling of the 
individual character, but upon a third condition; namely, a clear 
understanding of the conditions of social life on the part of 
both the capitalist and the operative, and their agreement upon 
common principles of social action. They must learn that so- 
cial phenomena are as much the expression of natural laws as 
any others ; that no social arrangements can be permanent 
unless they harmonize with the requirements of social statics 
and dynamics ; and that, in the nature of things, there is an 
arbiter whose decisions execute themselves. 

But this knowledge is only to be obtained by the application 
of the methods of investigation adopted in physical researches 
to the investigation of the phenomena of society. Hence, I 
confess, I should like to see one addition made to the excellent 
scheme of education propounded for the College, in the shape 
of provision for the teaching of sociology. For though we are 
all agreed that party politics are to have no place in the instruc- 
tion of the College ; yet in this country, practically governed as it 
is now by universal suffrage, every man who does his duty must 
exercise political functions. And, if the evils which are insepar- 
able from the good of political liberty are to be checked, if the 
perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism 
is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom ; 
it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal 
with political, as they now deal with scientific, questions ; to be as 
ashamed of undue haste and partisan prejudice in the one case as 
in the other ; and to believe that the machinery of society is at 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE 45 

least as delicate as that of a spinning jenny, and as little likely 
to be improved by the meddling of those who have not taken the 
trouble to master the principles of its action. 

In conclusion, I am sure that I make myself the mouthpiece of 
all present in offering to the venerable founder of the Institution, 
which now commences its beneficent career, our congratulations 
on the completion of his work ; and in expressing the conviction, 
that the remotest posterity will point to it as a crucial instance 
of the wisdom which natural piety leads all men to ascribe to 
their ancestors. 



Ill 

THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 

William Kingdon Clifford 

[William Kingdon Clifford (1845-1879) was a celebrated mathematician 
whose intellectual versatility often led him into quite other fields of interest, 
as the title of this essay bears witness. He was educated at Cambridge, 
where he gained a reputation as a mathematical genius, besides winning 
distinction in literature and the classics. At the conclusion of his residence 
in 1 87 1 he was appointed professor of applied mathematics at University 
College, London, a position he held with distinction until his premature 
death eight years later, when, although but thirty-four years of age, he was 
recognized as one of the leading scientific thinkers of his day. 

While CHfford's classic contributions are to mathematical hterature, the 
facile and original bent of his mind is well attested by his essays on meta- 
physics and philosophy and his habit of applying his mathematically thought 
out ideas to ethical and religious questions. The Ethics of Belief, which 
tj^ifies the author's felicity of phrase and illustration as well as his power of 
subtle if not always convincing reasoning, may be regarded as a plea for an 
agnostic attitude in all matters of commonly accepted behef, rehgious or 
otherwise. In this connection it is interesting to note that Clifford as an 
undergraduate was a High Churchman, fond of experimenting in schemes for 
the reconciliation of science and dogma; but later under the influence of 
Darwin and Herbert Spencer he came to regard the possibiUty of such a rec- 
onciliation as highly improbable. Clifford's arguments for the rejection of 
all beliefs unsupported by "sufficient evidence" are answered by Professor 
James in the next essay. 

The Ethics of Belief was first published in the Contemporary Review for 
January, 1877.] 

I. The Duty of Inquiry 

A SHIPOWNER was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. 
He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first ; 
that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed 
repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she 
was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and 

46 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 47 

made him unhappy ; he thought that perhaps he ought to have 
her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should 
put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he 
succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said 
to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and 
weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose that she 
would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put 
his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all 
these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek 
for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all 
ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contrac- 
tors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable con- 
viction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy ; he 
watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes 
for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to 
be ; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid- 
ocean and told no tales. 

What shall we say of him ? Surely this, that he was verily 
guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did 
sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship ; but the sincerity 
of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right 
to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his 
belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by 
stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt 
so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch 
as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that 
frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it. 

Let us alter the case a little, and suppose that the ship was not 
unsound after all ; that she made her voyage safely, and many 
others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner ? Not 
one jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for- 
ever ; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly 
alter that. The man would not have been innocent ; he would 
only have been not found out. The question of right or wrong 
has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it ; not 
what it was, but how he got it ; not whether it turned out to be 



48 WILLIAM KINGDOM CLIFFORD 

true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evi- 
dence as was before him. 

There was once an island in which some of the inhabitants 
professed a religion teaching neither the doctrine of original sin 
nor that of eternal punishment. A suspicion got abroad that the 
professors of this religion had made use of unfair means to get 
their doctrines taught to children. They were accused of wrest- 
ing the laws of their country in such a way as to remove children 
from the care of their natural and legal guardians ; and even 
of stealing them away and keeping them concealed from their 
friends and relations. A certain number of men formed them- 
selves into a society for the purpose of agitating the public about 
this matter. They published grave accusations against individual 
citizens of the highest position and character, and did all in their 
power to injure these citizens in the exercise of their professions. 
So great was the noise they made, that a Commission was ap- 
pointed to investigate the facts ; but after the Commission had 
carefully inquired into all the evidence that could be got, it ap- 
peared that the accused were innocent. Not only had they been 
accused on insufficient evidence, but the evidence of their inno- 
cence was such as the agitators might easily have obtained, if 
they had attempted a fair inquiry. After these disclosures the 
inhabitants of that country looked upon the members of the agi- 
tating society, not only as persons whose judgment was to be 
distrusted, but also as no longer to be counted honorable men. 
For although they had sincerely and "conscientiously" believed 
in the charges they had made, yet they had no right to believe on 
such evidence as was before them. Their sincere convictions, in- 
stead of being honestly earned by patient inquiring, were stolen 
by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion. 

Let us vary this case also, and suppose, other things remain- 
ing as before, that a still more accurate investigation proved 
the accused to have been really guilty. Would this make any 
difference in the guilt of the accusers ? Clearly not ; the ques- 
tion is not whether their belief was true or false, but whether 
they entertained it on wrong grounds. They would no doubt 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 



49 



say, "Now you see that we were right after all; next time 
perhaps you will believe us." And they might be believed, but 
they would not thereby become honorable men. They would not 
be innocent, they would only be not found out. Every one of 
them, if he chose to examine himself in foro conscientia,^ wovdd 
know that he had acquired and nourished a belief, when he had 
no right to believe on such evidence as was before him ; and 
therein he would know that he had done a wrong thing. 

It may be said, however, that in both of these supposed cases 
it is not the belief which is judged to be wrong, but the action 
following upon it. The shipowner might say, "I am perfectly 
certain that my ship is sound, but still I feel it is my duty to have 
her examined, before trusting the lives of so many people to her." 
And it might be said to the agitator, "However convinced you 
were of the justice of your cause and the truth of your convic- 
tions, you ought not to have made a public attack upon any 
man's character until you had examined the evidence on both 
sides with the utmost patience and care." 

In the first place, let us admit that, so far as it goes, this view 
of the case is right and necessary ; right, because even when a 
man's belief is so fixed that he cannot think otherwise, he still 
has a choice in regard to the action suggested by it, and so can- 
not escape the duty of investigating on the ground of the 
strength of his convictions ; and necessary, because those who 
are not yet capable of controlling their feelings and thoughts 
must have a plain rule dealing with overt acts. 

But this being premised as necessary, it becomes clear that it 
is not sufficient, and that our previous judgment is required to 
supplement it. For it is not possible so to sever the faith from 
the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning 
the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a ques- 
tion, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate 
it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt 
and unbiased ; so that the existence of a belief, not founded on fair 
inquiry, unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty. 
1 Before the tribunal of his conscience. — Editors. 



50 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

Nor is that truly a belief at all which has not some influence 
upon the actions of him who holds it. He who truly believes 
that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action 
to lust after it ; he has committed it already in his heart. If a be- 
lief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for 
the guidance of the future. It goes to make a part of that aggre- 
gate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at 
every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and 
compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the 
rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole. 
No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is 
ever truly insignificant ; it prepares us to receive more of its like, 
confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others ; 
and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, 
which may some day explode into overt action, and leave its 
stamp upon our character forever. 

And no one man's belief is in any case a private matter which 
concerns himself alone. Our lives are guided by that general 
conception of the course of things which has been created by 
society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms 
and processes and modes of thought, are common property, 
fashioned and perfected from age to age ; an heirloom, which 
every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and 
a sacred trust, to be handed on to the next one, not unchanged, 
but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper 
handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of 
every man who has speech of his fellows. An awful privilege, 
and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the 
world in which posterity will live. 

In the two supposed cases which have been considered, it has 
been judged wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, or to nour- 
ish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation. 
The reason of this judgment is not far to seek ; it is that in both 
these cases the belief held by one man was of great importance 
to other men. But forasmuch as no belief held by one man, 
however seemingly trivial the belief, and however obscure the 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 51 

believer, is ever actually insignificant or without its effect on the 
fate of mankind, we have no choice but to extend our judgment 
to all cases of belief whatever. Belief, that sacred faculty, which 
prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious work- 
ing all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for our- 
selves but for humanity. It is rightly used on truths which 
have been established by long tradition and waiting toil, and 
which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless question- 
ing. Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and 
direct their common action. It is desecrated when given to un- 
proved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private 
pleasure of the believer ; to add a tinsel splendor to the plain, 
straight road of our life, and display a bright mirage beyond it ; 
or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self- 
deception which allows them not only to cast down, but also to 
degrade us. Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this 
matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism 
of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy 
object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. 

It is not only the leader of men, statesman, philosopher, or 
poet, that owes this bounden duty to mankind. Every rustic 
who delivers in the village alehouse his slow infrequent sentences, 
may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog 
his race. Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit 
to her children beliefs which shall knit society together, or rend 
it in pieces. No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can 
escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe. 

It is true that this duty is a hard one, and the doubt which 
comes out of it is often a very bitter thing. It leaves us bare 
and powerless where we thought that we were safe and strong. 
To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under 
all circumstances. We feel much happier and more secure when 
we think we know precisely what we do, no matter what hap- 
pens, than when we have lost our way and do not know where to 
turn. And if we have supposed purselves to know all about 
anything, and to be capable of doing what is fit in regard to it, 



52 WILLIAM KINGDOM CLIFFORD 

we naturally do not like to find that we are really ignorant and 
powerless, that we have to begin again at the beginning, and try to 
learn what the thing is and how it is to be dealt with — if indeed 
anything can be learned about it. It is the sense of power at- 
tached to a sense of knowledge that makes men desirous of believ- 
ing, and afraid of doubting. 

This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when 
the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been 
fairly earned by investigation. For then we may justly feel 
that it is common property, and holds good for others as well as 
for ourselves. Then we may be glad, not that / have learned 
secrets by which I am safer and stronger, but that we men have 
got mastery over more of the world ; and we shall be strong, not 
for ourselves, but in the name of Man and in his strength. But 
if the belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the 
pleasure is a stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by 
giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but 
it is sinful, because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to man- 
kind. That duty is, to guard ourselves from such beliefs as 
from a pestilence, which may shortly master our own body and 
then spread to the rest of the town. What would be thought of 
one who, for the sake of a sweet fruit, should deliberately run 
the risk of bringing a plague upon his family and his neighbors ? 

And, as in other such cases, it is not the risk only which has to 
be considered ; for a bad action is always bad at the time when it 
is done, no matter what happens afterwards. Every time we let 
ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of 
self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evi- 
dence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and 
support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they 
lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is 
great and wide. But a greater and wider evil arises when the 
credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of 
believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent. 
If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done 
by the mere transfer of possession ; he may not feel the loss, or 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 53 

it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot 
help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself 
dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should lose its 
property, but that it should become a den of thieves ; for then it 
must cease to be society. This is why we ought not to do evil 
that good may come ; for at any rate this great evil has come, 
that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby. In like 
manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, 
there may be no great harm done by the mere belief ; it may be 
true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in out- 
ward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards 
Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is 
not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is 
great enough ; but that it should become credulous, and lose the 
habit of testing things and inquiring into them ; for then it must 
sink back into savagery. 

The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined 
to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent 
support of false beliefs. Habitual want of care about what I be- 
lieve leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of 
what is told to me. Men speak the truth to one another when 
each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other's mind ; 
but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I 
myself am careless about it, when I believe things because I 
want to believe them, and because they are comforting and pleas- 
ant? Will he not learn to cry, "Peace," to me, when. there is 
no peace? By such a course I shall surround myself with a 
thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must 
live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet 
illusions and darling lies ; but it matters much to Man that I 
have made my neighbors ready to deceive. The credulous man 
is father to the liar and the cheat ; he lives in the bosom of this 
his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they 
are. So closely are our duties knit together, that whoso shall 
keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of 
all. 



54 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

To sum up : it is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, 
to believe anything upon insufficient -evidence. 

If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or 
persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts 
which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of 
books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, 
and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be 
asked without disturbing it ; the life of that man is one long sin 
against mankind. 

If this judgment seems harsh when applied to those simple 
souls who have never known better, who have been brought up 
from the cradle with a horror of doubt, and taught that their 
eternal welfare depends on what they believe; then it leads to 
the very serious question. Who hath made Israel to sin? 

It may be permitted me to fortify this judgment with the 
sentence of Milton ^ : — 

" A man may be a heretic in "the truth ; and if he.believe things 
only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, 
without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the 
very truth he holds becomes his heresy." 

And with the famous aphorism of Coleridge ^ : — 

"He who begins by lo\dng Christianity better than Truth, 
will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Chris- 
tianity, and end in loving himself better than all." 

Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once 
for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to 
stifle a doubt ; for either it can be honestly answered by means 
of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry 
was not complete. 

"But," says one, "I am a busy man ; I have no time for the 
long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any 
degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to 
understand the nature of the arguments." Then he should have 
no time to believe. 

1 Areopagitica. - Aids to Reflection. 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 55 

II. The Weight of Authority 

Are we then to become universal skeptics, doubting everything, 
afraid always to put one foot before the other until we have per- 
sonally tested the firmness of the road ? Are we to deprive our- 
selves of the help and guidance of that vast body of knowledge 
which is daily growing upon the world, because neither we nor any 
other one person can possibly test a hundredth part of it by imme- 
diate experiment or observation, and because it would not be com- 
pletely proved if we did ? Shall we steal and tell lies because we 
have had no personal experience wide enough to justify the belief 
that it is wrong to do so ? 

There is no practical danger that such consequences will ever 
follow from scrupulous care and self-control in the matter of 
belief. Those men who have most nearly done their duty in 
this respect have found that certain great principles, and these 
most fitted for the guidance of life, have stood out more and 
more clearly in proportion to the care and honesty with which 
they were tested, and have acquired in this way a practical cer- 
tainty. The beliefs about right and wrong which guide our 
actions in dealing with men in society, and the beliefs about 
physical nature which guide our actions in dealing with animate 
and inanimate bodies, these never suffer from investigation ; 
they can take care of themselves, without being propped up by 
"acts of faith." the clamor of paid advocates, or the suppression 
of contrary evidence. Moreover, there are many cases in which 
it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence 
is not such as to justify present belief ; because it is precisely 
by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is 
got which may justify future belief. So that we have no reason 
to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyze the 
actions of our daily life. 

But because it is not enough to say, "It is wrong to believe 
on unworthy evidence," without saying also what evidence is 
worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances 
it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others ; and then, fur- 



56 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

ther , we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe 
that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the 
experience of mankind. 

In what cases, then, let us ask in the first place, is the testi- 
mony of a man unworthy of belief ? He may say that which is 
untrue either knowingly or unknowingly. In the first case he is 
lying, and his moral character is to blame ; in the second case he 
is ignorant or mistaken, and it is only his knowledge or his judg- 
ment which is in fault. In order that we may have the right to 
accept his testimony as ground for believing what he says, we 
must have reasonable grounds for trusting his veracity , that he is 
really trying to speak the truth so far as he knows it ; his knowl- 
edge, that he has had opportunities of knowing the truth about 
this matter ; and \ns judgment, that he has made a proper use of 
those opportunities in coming to the conclusion which he affirms. 

However plain and obvious these considerations may be, so 
that no man of ordinary intelligence, reflecting on the matter, 
could fail to arrive at them, it is nevertheless true that a great 
many persons do habitually disregard them in weighing testi- 
mony. Of the two questions, equally important to the trust- 
worthiness of a witness, "Is he dishonest?" and "May he be 
mistaken?" the majority of mankind are perfectly satisfied if 
one can, with some show of probability, be answered in the nega- 
tive. The excellent moral character of a man is alleged as 
ground for accepting his statements about things which he can- 
not possibly have known. A Mohammedan, for example, will 
tell us that the character of his Prophet was so noble and majestic 
that it commands the reverence even of those who do not believe 
in his mission. So admirable was his moral teaching, so wisely 
put together the great social machine which he created, that 
his precepts have not only been accepted by a great portion of 
mankind, but have actually been obeyed. His institutions have 
on the one hand rescued the negro from savagery, and on the 
other hand have taught civilization to the advancing West ; 
and although the races which held the highest forms of his faith, 
and most fully embodied his mind and thought, have all been 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 57 

conquered and swept away by barbaric tribes, yet the history 
of their marvelous attainments remains as an imperishable 
glory to Islam. Are we to doubt the word of a man so grea' and 
so good? Can we suppose that this magnificent genius, this 
splendid moral hero, has lied to us about the most solemn and 
sacred matters? The testimony of Mohammed is clear, that 
there is but one God, and that he, Mohammed, is his prophet; 
that if we believe in him we shall enjoy everlasting felicity, but 
that if we do not we shall be damned. This testimony rests on 
the most awful of foundations, the revelation of heaven itself ; 
for was he not visited by the angel Gabriel, as he fasted and 
prayed in his desert cave, and allowed to enter into the blessed 
fields of Paradise? Surely God is God, and Mohammed is 
the Prophet of God. 

What should we answer to this Mussulman ? First, no doubt, 
we should be tempted to take exception against his view of the 
character of the Prophet and the uniformly beneficial influence 
of Islam : before we could go with him altogether in these 
matters it might seem that we should have to forget many 
terrible things of which we have heard or read. But if we chose 
to grant him all these assumptions, for the sake of argument, 
and because it is difficult both for the faithful and for infidels to 
discuss them fairly and \vithout passion ; still we should have 
something to say which takes away the ground of his belief, and 
therefore shows that it is wrong to entertain it. Namely this : 
the character of Mohammed is excellent evidence that he was 
honest and spoke the truth so far as he knew it ; but it is no evi- 
dence at all that he knew what the truth was. What means 
could he have of knowing that the form which appeared to him 
to be the angel Gabriel was not a hallucination, and that his 
apparent visit to Paradise was not a dream? Grant that he 
himself was fully persuaded and honestly believed that he had 
the guidance of heaven, and was the vehicle of a supernatural 
revelation ; how could he know that this strong conviction was 
not a mistake ? Let us put ourselves in his place ; we shall find 
that the more completely we endeavor to realize what passed 



58 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

through his mind, the more clearly we shall perceive that the 
Prophet could have had no adequate ground for the beUef in 
his own inspiration. It is most probable that he himself never 
doubted of the matter, or thought of asking the question ; but we 
are in the position of those to whom the question has been asked, 
and who are bound to answer it. It is known to medical observers 
that solitude and want of food are powerful means of producing 
delusion and of fostering a tendency to mental disease. Let us 
suppose, then, that I, like Mohammed, go into desert places to 
fast and pray ; what things can happen to me which will give me 
the right to believe that I am divinely inspired ? Suppose that 
I get information, apparently from a celestial visitor, which upon 
being tested is found to be correct. I cannot be sure, in the first 
place, that the celestial visitor is not a figment of my own mind, 
and that the information did not come to me, unknown at the 
•time to my consciousness, through some subtle channel of 
sense. But if my visitor were a real visitor, and for a long time 
gave me information which was found to be trustworthy, this 
would indeed be good ground for trusting him in the future as to 
such matters as fall within human powers of verification; but 
it would not be ground for trusting his testimony as to any 
other matters. For although his tested character would justify 
me in believing that he spoke the truth so far as he knew, yet the 
same question would present itself — what ground is there for 
supposing that he knows ? 

Even if my supposed visitor had given me such information, 
subsequently verified by me, as proved him to have means of 
knowledge about verifiable matters far exceeding my own ; this 
would not justify me in believing what he said about matters that 
are not at present capable of verification by man. It would be 
ground for interesting conjecture, and for the hope that, as the 
fruit of our patient inquiry, we might by and by attain to such 
a means of verification as should rightly turn conjecture into be- 
lief. For behef belongs to man, and to the guidance of human 
affairs : no belief is real unless it guide our actions, and those 
very actions supply a test of its truth. 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 59 

But, it may be replied, the acceptance of Islam as a system is 
just that action which is prompted by belief in the mission of the 
Prophet, and which will serve for a test of its truth. Is it 
possible to believe that a system which has succeeded so well is 
really founded upon a delusion ? Not only have individual 
saints found joy and peace in believing, and verified those 
spiritual experiences which are promised to the faithful, but na- 
tions also have been raised from savagery or barbarism to a 
higher social state. Surely we are at liberty to say that the 
belief has been acted upon, and that it has been verified. 

It requires, however, but little consideration to show that what 
has really been verified is not at all the supernal character of the 
Prophet's mission, or the trustworthiness of his authority in 
matters which we ourselves cannot test ; but only his practical 
wisdom in certain very mundane things. The fact that be- 
lievers have found joy and peace in believing gives us the right 
to say that the doctrine is a comfortable doctrine, and pleasant 
to the soul ; but it does not give us the right to say that it is true. 
And the question which our conscience is always asking about 
that which we are tempted to believe is not "Is it comfortable 
and pleasant?" but "Is it true?" That the Prophet preached 
certain doctrines, and predicted that spiritual comfort would be 
found in them, proves only his sympathy with human nature 
and his knowledge of it ; but it does not prove his superhuman 
knowledge of theology. 

And if we admit for the sake of argument (for it seems that we 
cannot do more) that the progress made by Moslem nations in 
certain cases was really due to the system formed and sent forth 
into the world by Mohammed ; we are not at liberty to conclude 
from this that he was inspired to declare the truth about things 
which we cannot verify. We are only at liberty to infer the ex- 
cellence of his moral precepts, or of the means which he devised 
for so working upon men as to get them obeyed, or of the social 
and political machinery which he set up. And it would require 
a great amount of careful examination into the history of those 
nations to determine which of these things had the greater share 



6o WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

in the result. So that here again it is the Prophet's knowledge of 

human nature, and his sympathy with it, that are verified ; not 
his divine inspiration, or his knowledge of theology. 

If there were only one Prophet, indeed, it might well seem a 
difficult and even an ungracious task to decide upon what points 
we would trust him, and on what we would doubt his authority ; 
seeing what help and furtherance all men have gained in all ages 
from those who saw more clearly, who felt more strongly, and 
who sought the truth wath more single heart than their weaker 
brethren. But there is not only one Prophet ; and while the con- 
sent of many upon that which, as men, they had real means of 
knowing and did know, has endured to the end, and been honor- 
ably built into the great fabric of human knowledge ; the diverse 
witness of some about that which they did not and could not 
know remains as a warning to us that to exaggerate the prophetic 
authority is to misuse it, and to dishonor those who have sought 
only to help and further us after their power. It is hardly in 
human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the 
limits of his own insight ; but it is the duty of those who profit 
by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried 
beyond it. If we must needs embalm his possible errors along 
with his solid achievements, and use his authority as an excuse 
for believing what he cannot have known, we make of his good- 
ness an occasion to sin. 

To consider only one other such witness : the followers of 
Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and 
social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern 
saviour. The special mark of his religion, it is said, that in which 
it has never been surpassed, is the comfort and consolation which 
it gives to the sick and sorrowful, the tender sympathy with 
which it soothes and assuages all the natural griefs of men. And 
surely no triumph of social morality can be greater or nobler than 
that which has kept nearly half the human race from persecuting 
in the name of religion. If we are to trust the accounts of his 
early followers, he believed himself to have come down upon 
earth with a divine and cosmic mission to set rolling the wheel of 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 6i 

the law. Being a prince, he emptied himself of his kingdom, and 
of his free will became acquainted with misery, that he might 
learn how to meet and subdue it. Could such a man speak 
falsely about solemn things ? And as for his knowledge, was he 
not a man miraculous, with powers more than man's ? He was 
born of woman without the help of man ; he rose into the air and 
was transfigured before his kinsmen ; at last he went up bodily 
into hea\-en from the top of Adam's Peak. Is not his word to 
be believed in when he testifies of heavenly things ? 

If there were only he, and no other, with such claims! But 
there is Mohammed with his testimony ; we cannot choose but 
listen to them both. The Prophet tells us that there is one God, 
and that we shall live forever in joy or misery, according as we 
believe in the Prophet or not. The Buddha says that there is no 
God, and that we shall be annihilated by and by if we are good 
enough. Both cannot be infallibly inspired ; one or the other 
must have been the victim of a delusion, and thought he knew 
that which he really did not know. Who shall dare to say 
which? and how can we justify ourselves in believing that the 
other was not also deluded ? 

We are led, then, to these judgments following. The goodness 
and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon 
the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds 
for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying. And 
there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that 
which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to 
verify. 

If a chemist tells me, who am no chemist, that a certain sub- 
stance can be made by putting together other substances in 
certain proportions and subjecting them to a known process, I 
am quite justified in believing this upon his authority, unless I 
know anything against his character or his judgment. For his 
professional training is one which tends to encourage veracity 
and the honest pursuit of truth, and to produce a dislike of hasty 
conclusions and slovenly investigation. And I have reasonable 
ground for supposing that he knows the truth of what he is saying, 



62 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

for although I am no chemist, I can be made to understand so 
much of the methods and processes of the science as makes it 
conceivable to me that, without ceasing to be man, I might verify 
the statement. I may never actually verify it, or even see any 
experiment which goes towards verifying it; but still I have 
quite reason enough to justify me in believing that the verifica- 
tion is within the reach of human appliances and powers, and in 
particular that it has been actually performed by my informant. 
His result, the belief to which he has been led by his inquiries, 
is valid not only for himself but for others ; it is watched and 
tested by those who are working in the same ground, and who 
know that no greater service can be rendered to science than the 
purification of accepted results from the errors which may have 
crept into them. It is in this way that the result becomes com- 
mon property, a right object of belief, which is a social affair and 
matter of public business. Thus it is to be observed that his 
authority is valid because there are those who question it and 
verify it ; that it is precisely this process of examining and purify- 
ing that keeps alive among investigators the love of that which 
shall stand all possible tests, the sense of public responsibility as 
of those whose work, if well done, shall remain as the enduring 
heritage of mankind. 

But if my chemist tells me that an atom of oxygen has existed 
'unaltered in weight and rate of vibration throughout all time, I 
have no right to believe this on his authority, for it is a thing 
which he cannot know without ceasing to be man. He may 
quite honestly believe that this statement is a fair inference from 
his experiments, but in that case his judgment is at fault. A 
very simple consideration of the character of experiments would 
show him that they never can lead to results of such a kind ; that 
being themselves only approximate and Hmited, they cannot 
give us knowledge which is exact and universal. No eminence 
of character and genius can give a man authority enough to 
justify us in believing him when he makes ^statements implying 
exact or universal knowledge. 

Again, an Arctic explorer may tell us that in a given latitude 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 63 

and longitude he has experienced such and such a degree of cold, 
that the sea was of such a depth, and the ice of such a character. 
We should be quite right to believe him in the absence of any 
stain upon his veracity. It is conceivable that we might, with- 
out ceasing to be men, go there and verify his statement; it can 
be tested by the witness of his companions, and there is adequate 
ground for supposing that he knows the truth of what he is say- 
ing. But if an old whaler tells us that the ice is three hundred 
feet thick all the way up to the Pole, we shall not be justified in 
believing him. For although the statement may be capable of 
verification by man, it is certainly not capable of verification by 
him, with any means and appliances which he has possessed ; 
and he must have persuaded himself of the truth of it by some 
means which does not attach any credit to his testimony. Even 
if, therefore, the matter affirmed is within the reach of human 
knowledge, we have no right to accept it upon authority unless 
it is within the reach of our informant's knowledge. 

What shall we say of that authority, more venerable and au- 
gust than any individual witness, the time-honored tradition of 
the human race ? An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has 
been formed by the labors and struggles of our forefathers, which 
enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances 
of our life. It is around and about us and within us ; we cannot 
think except in the forms and processes of thought which it 
supplies. Is it possible to doubt and to test it ? and if possible, 
is it right ? 

We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and 
right, but our bounden duty ; that the main purpose of the tradi- 
tion itself is to supply us with the means of asking questions, of 
testing and inquiring into things ; that if we misuse it, and take 
it as a collection of cut and dried statements, to be accepted 
without further inquiry, we are not only injuring ourselves here, 
but by refusing to do our part towards the building up of the 
fabric which shall be inherited by our children, we are tending to 
cut off ourselves and our race from the human line. 

Let us take care to distinguish a kind of tradition which es- 



64 WILLIAM KINGDOM CLIFFORD 

pecially requires to be examined and called in question, because 
it especially shrinks from inquiry. Suppose that a medicine man 
in Central Africa tells his tribe that a certain powerful medicine 
in his tent will be propitiated if they kill their cattle ; and that 
the tribe believe him. Whether the medicine was propitiated or 
not, there are no means of verifying, but the cattle are gone. 
Still the belief may be kept up in the tribe that propitiation has 
been effected in this way ; and in a later generation it will be all 
the easier for another medicine man to persuade them to a similar 
act. Here the only reason for belief is that everybody has be- 
lieved the thing for so long that it must be true. And yet the 
belief was founded on fraud, and has been propagated by credu- 
lity. That man will undoubtedly do right, and be a friend of 
men, who shall call it in question and see that there is no evidence 
for it, help his neighbors to see as he does, and even, if need be, 
go into the holy tent and break the medicine. 

The rule which should guide us in such cases is simple and ob- 
vious enough : that the aggregate testimony of our neighbors is 
subject to the same conditions as the testimony of any one of 
them. Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because 
everybody says so, unless there are good grounds for believing 
that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is 
true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it. However 
many nations and generations of men are brought into the wit- 
ness box, they cannot testify to anything which they do not 
know. Every man who has accepted the statement from some- 
body else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court ; 
his word is worth nothing at all. And when we get back at last 
to the true birth and beginning of the statement, two serious 
questions must be disposed of in regard to him who first made it : 
was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or 
was he lying ? 

This last question is unfortunately a very actual and practical 
one, even to us at this day and In this country. We have no 
occasion to go to La Salette, or to Central Africa, or to Lourdes 
for examples of immoral and debasing superstition. It is only 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 65 

too possible for a child to grow up in London surrounded by an 
atmosphere of beliefs fit only for the savage, which have in our 
own time been founded in fraud and propagated by credulity. 

Laying aside, then, such tradition as is handed on without 
testing by successive generations, let us consider that which is 
truly built up out of the common experience of mankind. This 
great fabric is for the guidance of our thoughts, and through 
them of our actions, both in the moral and in the material world. 
In the moral world, for example, it gives us the conceptions of 
right in general, of justice, of truth, of beneficence, and the like. 
These are given as conceptions, not as statements or propositions; 
they answer to certain definite instincts, which are certainly 
within us, however they came there. That it is right to be benefi- 
cent is a matter of immediate personal experience ; for when a 
man retires within himself and there finds something, wider and 
more lasting than his solitary personality, which says, "I want 
to do right," as well as, "I want to do good to man," he can 
verify by direct observation that one instinct is founded upon 
and agrees fully with the other. And it is his duty so to verify 
this and all similar statements. 

The tradition says also, at a definite place and time, that such 
and such actions are just, or true, or beneficent. For all such 
rules a further inquiry is necessary, since they are sometimes 
established by an authority other than that of the moral sense 
founded on experience. Until recently, the moral tradition of 
our own country — and indeed of all Europe — taught that it 
was beneficent to give money indiscriminately to beggars. But 
the questioning of this rule, and investigation into it, led men to 
see that true beneficence is that which helps a man to do the 
work which he is most fitted for, not that which keeps and 
encourages him in idleness ; and that to neglect this distinc- 
tion in the present is to prepare pauperism and misery for 
the future. By this testing and discussion, not only has prac- 
tice been purified and made more beneficent, but the very con- 
ception of beneficence has been made wider and wiser. Now 
here the great social heirloom consists of two parts : the instinct 



66 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

of beneficence, which makes a certain side of our nature, when 
predominant, wish to do good to men ; and the intellectual con- 
ception of beneficence, which we can compare with any proposed 
course of conduct and ask, " Is this beneficent or not ? " By the 
continual asking and answering of such questions the conception 
grows in breadth and distinctness, and the instinct becomes 
strengthened and purified. It appears then that the great use 
of the conception, the intellectual part of the heirloom, is to 
enable us to ask questions ; that it grows and is kept straight by 
means of these questions ; and if we do not use it for that purpose 
we shall gradually lose it altogether, and be left with a mere code 
of regulations which cannot rightly be called morality at all. 

Such considerations apply even more obviously and clearly, if 
possible, to the store of beliefs and conceptions which our fathers 
have amassed for us in respect of the material world. We are 
ready to laugh at the rule of thumb of the Australian, who 
continues to tie his hatchet to the side of the handle, although 
the Birmingham fitter has made a hole on purpose for him to put 
the handle in. His people have tied up hatchets so for ages : 
who is he that he should set himself up against their wisdom? 
He has sunk so low that he cannot do what some of them must 
have done in the far distant past — call in question an estab- 
lished usage, and invent or learn something better. Yet here, in 
the dim beginning of knowledge, where science and art are one, 
we find only the same simple rule which applies to the highest 
and deepest growths of that cosmic Tree ; to its loftiest flower- 
tipped branches as well as to the profoundest of its hidden roots ; 
the rule, namely, that what is stored up and handed down to us 
is rightly used by those who act as the makers acted, when they 
stored it up ; those who use it to ask further questions, to examine, 
to investigate ; who try honestly and solemnly to find out what 
is the right way of looking at things and of dealing with them. 

A question rightly asked is already half answered, said Jacobi ; 
we may add that the method of solution is the other half of the 
answer, and that the actual result counts for nothing by the side 
of these two. For an example let us go to the telegraph, where 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 67 

theory and practice, grown each to years of discretion, are 
marvelously wedded for the fruitful service of men. Ohm 
found that the strength of an electric current is directly propor- 
tional to the strength of the battery which produces it, and in- 
versely as the length of the wire along which it has to travel. This 
is called Ohm's law ; but the result, regarded as a statement to be 
believed, is not the valuable part of it. The first half is the 
question : what relation holds good between these quantities ? 
So put, the question involves already the conception of strength 
of current, and of strength of battery, as quantities to be measured 
and compared ; it hints clearly that these are the things to be 
attended to in the study of electric currents. The second half is 
the method of investigation ; how to measure these quantities, 
what apparatus are required for the experiment, and how are 
they to be used ? The student who begins to learn about elec- 
tricity is not asked to begin in Ohm's law ; he is made to under- 
stand the question, he is placed before the apparatus, and he is 
taught to verify it. He learns to do things, not to think he 
knows things ; to use instruments and to ask questions, not to 
accept a traditional statement. The question which required a 
genius to ask it rightly is answered by a tyro. If Ohm's law were 
suddenly lost and forgotten by all men, while the question and 
the method of solution remained, the result could be rediscovered 
in an hour. But the result by itself, if known to a people who 
could not comprehend the value of the question or the means of 
solving it, would be like a watch in the hands of a savage who 
could not wind it up, or an iron steamship worked by Spanish 
engineers. 

In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn 
that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to 
be accepted and beUeved on the authority of the tradition, but in 
questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask 
further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The 
value of all these things depends on their being tested day„by 
day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon 
us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying 



68 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

and enlarging it to the utmost of our power. He who makes use 
of its results to stifle his own doubts, or to hamper the inquiry of 
others, is guilty of a sacrilege which centuries shall never be able 
to blot out. When the labors and questionings of honest and 
brave men shall have built up the fabric of known truth to a 
glory which we in this generation can neither hope for nor im- 
agine ; in that pure and holy temple he shall have no part nor 
lot, but his name and his works shall be cast out into the dark- 
ness of oblivion forever. 

III. The Limits of Inference 

The question, in what cases we may believe that which goes 
beyond our experience, is a very large and delicate one, extending 
to the whole range of scientific method, and requiring a consider- 
able increase in the application of it before it can be answered 
with anything approaching to completeness. But one rule, lying 
on the threshold of the subject, of extreme simplicity and vast 
practical importance, may here be touched upon and shortly laid 
down. 

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the sim- 
plest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when re- 
garded as a guide to our actions. A burnt child dreads the fire, 
because it believes that the fire will burn it to-day just as it did 
yesterday ; but this belief goes beyond experience, and assumes 
that the unknown fire of to-day is like the known fire of yesterday. 
Even the belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond 
present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, 
and not the burning itself ; it assumes, therefore, that this 
memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may 
often be mistaken. But if it is to be used as a guide of action, 
as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something 
about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the 
supposition that the burning really took place yesterday ; which 
is going beyond experience. Even the fundamental "I am," 
which cannot be doubted, is no guide to action until it takes to 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 69 

itself "I shall be," which goes beyond experience. The question 
is not, therefore, " May we believe what goes beyond experience ? " 
for this is involved in the very nature of belief; but "How far 
and in what manner may we add to our experience in forming 
our beUefs?" 

And an answer, of utter simplicity and universality, is sug- 
gested by the example we have taken : a burnt child dreads the 
fire. We may go beyond experience by assuming that what we 
do not know is like what we do know ; or, in other words, we 
may add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in 
nature. What this uniformity precisely is, how we grow in the 
knowledge of it from generation to generation, these are ques- 
tions which for the present we lay aside, being content to examine 
two instances which may serve to make plainer the nature of the 
rule. 

From certain observations made with the spectroscope, we 
infer the existence of hydrogen in the sun. By looking into the 
spectroscope when the sun is shining on its slit, we see certain 
definite bright lines ; and experiments made upon bodies on the 
earth have taught us that when these bright lines are seen, hy- 
drogen is the source of them. We assume, then, that the un- 
known bright lines in the sun are like the known bright lines of 
the laboratory, and that hydrogen in the sun behaves as hydro- 
gen under similar circumstances would behave on the earth. 

But are we not trusting our spectroscope too much ? Surely, 
having found it to be trustworthy for terrestrial substances, 
where its statements can be verified by man, we are justified in 
accepting its testimony in other like cases ; but not when it 
gives us information about things in the sun, where its testimony 
cannot be directly verified by man ? 

Certainly, we want to know a little more before this inference 
can be justified ; and fortunately we do know this. The spec- 
troscope testifies to exactly the same thing in the two cases ; 
namely, that light vibrations of a certain rate are being sent 
through it. Its construction is such that if it were wrong about 
this in one case it would be wrong in the other. When we come 



yo WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

to look into the matter, we find that we have really assumed the 
matter of the sun to be like the matter of the earth, made up of 
a certain number of distinct substances ; and that each of these, 
when very hot, has a distinct rate of vibration, by which it may 
be recognized and singled out from the rest. But this is the 
kind of assumption which we are justified in using when we add 
to our experience. It is an assumption of uniformity in nature, 
and can only be checked by comparison with many similar as- 
sumptions which we have to make in other such cases. 

But is this a true belief, of the existence of hydrogen in the 
sun ? Can it help in the right guidance of human action ? 

Certainly not, if it is accepted on unworthy grounds, and with- 
out some understanding of the process by which it is got at. 
But when this process is taken in as the ground of the belief, it 
becomes a very serious and practical matter. For if there is no 
hydrogen in the sun, the spectroscope — that is to say, the meas- 
urement of rates of vibration — must be an uncertain guide in 
recognizing different substances ; and consequently it ought not 
to be used in chemical analysis — in assaying, for example — to 
the great saving of time, trouble, and money. Whereas the ac- 
ceptance of the spectroscopic method as trustworthy has en- 
riched us not only with new metals, which is a great thing, but 
with new processes of investigation, which is vastly greater. 

For another example, let us consider the way in which we infer 
the truth of an historical event — say the siege of Syracuse in 
the Peloponnesian war. Our experience is that manuscripts 
exist which are said to be and which call themselves manuscripts 
of the history of Thucydides ; that in other manuscripts, stated 
to be by later historians, he is described as living during the time 
of the war ; and that books, supposed to date from the revival 
of learning, tell us how these manuscripts had been preserved 
and were then acquired. We find also that men do not, as a rule, 
forge books and histories without a special motive ; we assume 
that in this respect men in the past were like men in the present ; 
and we observe that in this case no special motive was present. 
That is, we add to our experience on the assumption of a uniform- 



THE ETHICS OF BELIEF 



71 



ity in the characters of men. Because our knowledge of this 
uniformity is far less complete and exact than our knowledge 
of that which obtains in physics, inferences of the historical 
kind are more precarious and less exact than inferences in many 
other sciences. 

But if there is any special reason to suspect the character of 
the persons who wrote or transmitted certain books, the case be- 
comes altered. If a group of documents give internal evidence 
that they were produced among people who forged books in the 
names of others, and who, in describing events, suppressed 
those things which did not suit them, while they amplified such 
as did suit them ; who not only committed these crimes, but 
gloried in them as proofs of humility and zeal ; then we must 
say that upon such documents no true historical inference can 
be founded, but only unsatisfactory conjecture. 

We may, then, add to our experience on the assumption of a 
uniformity in nature ; we may fill in our picture of what is and 
has been, as experience gives it to us, in such a way as to make 
the whole consistent with this uniformity. And practically de- 
monstrative inference — that which gives us a right to believe 
in the result of it — ^ is a clear showing that in no other way than 
by the truth of this result can the uniformity of nature be saved. 

No evidence, therefore, can justify us in believing the truth 
of a statement which is contrary to, or outside of, the uniformity 
of nature. If our experience is such that it cannot be filled up 
consistently with uniformity, all we have a right to conclude is 
that there is something wrong somewhere ; but the possibility 
of inference is taken away ; we must rest in our experience, and 
not go beyond it at all. If an event really happened, which was 
not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two proper- 
ties ; no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except 
those whose actual experience it was ; and no inference worthy 
of belief could be founded upon it at all. 

Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and 
universally uniform ? Certainly not ; we have no right to be- 
lieve anything of this kind. , The rule only tells us that in form- 



72 WILLIAM KINGDON CLIFFORD 

ing beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the 
assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are 
concerned. Within the range of human action and verification, 
we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs ; be- 
yond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate 
asking of questions. 

To sum up : — 

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when 
it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what 
we do not know is like what we know. 

We may believe the statement of another person, when there 
is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of 
which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he 
knows it. 

It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence ; and 
where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is 
worse than presumption to believe. 



IV 

THE WILL TO BELIEVE^ 

William James 

[William James (1842-1910), brother of the novelist, Henry James, is 
recognized as one of the ablest psychologists and philosophers America has 
produced. After studying medicine at Harvard, he began, in 1872, his life- 
long connection with that institution, occupying in turn chairs in physiology, 
psychology, and philosophy. His published work in these fields of knowledge 
has placed him among the foremost thinkers of our time. 

The following essay on The Will to Believe illustrates James's attitude 
toward religious faith, his reasonableness and ingenuity in argument, and 
his unconventionality and charm of style. As the champion of " the right 
to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters in spite of the fact that 
our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced," James takes 
issue flatly with the position of Clifford in the foregoing selection. His 
thesis is not that we have a right to believe anything we like, but 
that in the final problems of life, when presented with two alternatives, 
neither of which is capable of proof or disproof, it is more rational for us to 
choose the one which is in accord with our hopes rather than our fears. 

This essay was delivered as an address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale 
and Brown Universities, in April and May, 1896, and first printed in the 
New World for June of that year. Its argument, although universally 
commended for its brilliancy, occasioned many rejoinders, among them : 
E. Stettheimer's The Will to Believe as a Basis for the Defense of Religious 
Faith (tr. 1907), Dickinson S. Miller's The Will to Believe and the Duty to 
Doubt (International Journal of Ethics, January, 1899), and Vernon Lee's The 
Need to Believe {Fortnightly Review, November, 1899).] 

In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother, " 
Fitz- James, there is an account of a school to which the latter 
went when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used 

^ Reprinted by permission from The Will to Believe and other Essays in 
Popular Philosophy by William James (Longmans, Green, & Co.). 

73 



74 WILLIAM JAMES 

to converse with his pupils in this wise : " Gurney, what is the dif- 
ference between justification and sanctification ? — Stephen, 
prove the omnipotence of God !" etc. In the midst of our Har- 
vard freethinking and indifference we are prone to imagine that 
here at your good old orthodox College conversation continues 
to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you that we at 
Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have 
brought with me to-night something like a sermon on justifi- 
cation by faith to read to you, — I mean an essay in justifica- 
tion of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude 
in rehgious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical 
intellect may not have been coerced. The Will to Believe, ac- 
cordingly, is the title of my paper. 

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of 
voluntarily adopted faith ; but as soon as they have got well im- 
bued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit 
my contention to be lawful philosophically, even though in point 
of fact they were personally all the time chock-full of some faith 
or other themselves. I am all the while, however, so profoundly 
convinced that my own position is correct, that your invitation 
has seemed to me a good occasion to make my statements more 
clear. Perhaps your minds will be more open than those with 
which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be as Httle technical as 
I can, though I must begin by setting up some technical distinc- 
tions that will help us in the end. 



Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be 
proposed to our belief ; and just as the electricians speak of live 
3 and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or 
dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility 
to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the 
Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your na- 
ture, — it refuses to scintillate with any credibiUty at all. As an 
hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even 
if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE " 75 

among the mind's possibilities : it is alive. This shows that 
deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic proper- 
ties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are meas- 
ured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an 
hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, 
that means belief ; but there is some believing tendency wherever 
there is willingness to act at all. 

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an op- 
tion. Options may be of several kinds. They may be: i, liv- 
ing or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and 
for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it 
is of the forced, Hving, and momentous kind. 

1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live 
ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Moham- 
medan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither 
hypothesis is Hkely to be alive. But if I say : "Be an agnostic 
or be a Christian," it is otherwise : trained as you are, each 
hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief. 

2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with 
your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, 
for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at 
all. Similarly, if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either 
call my theory true or call it false," your option is avoidable. 
You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and 
you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But 
if I say, "Either accept this truth or go without it," I put on 
you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the 
alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical dis- 
junction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this 
forced kind. 

3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join 
my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; 
for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and 
your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole 
sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it 
into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique oppor- 



76 WILLIAM JAMES 

tunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per 
contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, 
when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is revers- 
ible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in 
the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough 
to spend a year in its verification : he beheves in it to that ex- 
tent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he 
is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done. 

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions 
well in mind. 

II 

The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of hu- 
man opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our 
passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our con- 
victions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do 
nothing when the intellect had once said its say. Let us take 
the latter facts up first. 

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk 
of our opinions being modifiable at will ? Can our will either 
help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth ? Can we, 
by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a 
myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure^s Magazine are 
all of some one else ? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by 
any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well 
and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel 
certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket 
must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, 
but we are absolutely impotent to beUeve them ; and of just 
such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe 
in made up, — matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume 
said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not 
there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be 
put there by any action of our own. 

In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in 
literature as Pascal's wager. In it he tries to force us into 
Christianity by reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 77 

our concern with the stakes in a game of chance. Translated 
freely, his words are these : You must either believe or not be- 
lieve that God is — which will you do ? Your human reason 
cannot say. A game is going on between you and the nature of 
things which at the day of judgment, will bring out either heads 
or tails. Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if 
you should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence : if 
you win in such case, you gain eternal beatitude ; if you 
lose, you lose nothing at all. If there were an infinity of 
chances, and only one for God in this wager, still you ought to 
stake your all on God; for though you surely risk a finite loss 
by this procedure, any finite loss is reasonable, even a certain 
one is reasonable, if there is but the possibility of infinite gain. 
Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said; belief 
will come and stupefy your scruples, — Cela vous /era croire el 
vous abetira. Why should you not ? At bottom, what have 
you to lose ? 

You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself 
thus, in the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last 
trumps. Surely Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy 
water had far other springs ; and this celebrated page of his is 
but an argument for others, a last desperate snatch at a weapon 
against the hardness of the unbelieving heart. We feel that a 
faith in masses and holy water adopted willfully after such a 
mechanical calculation would lack the inner soul of faith's 
reality ; and if we were ourselves in the place of the Deity, we 
should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers 
of this pattern from their infinite reward* It is evident that 
unless there be some preexisting tendency to believe in masses 
and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a 
living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy 
water on its account ; and even to us Protestants these means of 
salvation seem such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, 
invoked for them specifically, leaves us unmoved. As well 
might the Mahdi write to us, saying, "I am the Expected One 
whom God has created in his effulgence. You shall be infinitely 



78 WILLIAM JAMES 

happy if you confess me ; otherwise you shall be cut off from 
the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if I am 
genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not ! " His logic 
would be that of Pascal ; but he would vainly use it on us, for 
the hypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it 
exists in us to any degree. 

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one 
point of view, simply silly. From another point of view it is 
worse than silly; it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent 
edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared ; what 
thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its 
mere foundations ; what patience and postponement, what 
choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of 
outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how 
absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness, — then 
how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist 
who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretend- 
ing to decide things from out of his private dream ! Can we 
wonder if those bred in the rugged and manly school of science 
should feel like spewing such subjectivism out of their mouths ? 
The whole system of loyalties which grow up in the schools of 
science go dead against its toleration ; so that it is only natural 
that those who have caught the scientific fever should pass over 
to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the incor- 
ruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness 
and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup. 

It fortifies my soul to know 

That, though I perish. Truth is so — 

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation 
lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may be- 
come, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending 
to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may 
be to their advantage so to pretend [the word ' pretend ' is surely 
here redundant], they will not have reached the lowest depth of 
immorality." And that delicious enfant terrible Clifford writes : 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 79 

"Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned 
statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer. 
. . . Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter 
will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of 
jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy ob- 
ject, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. ... If 
[a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though 
the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the 
pleasure is a stolen one. ... It is sinful because it is stolen in 
deliance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard our- 
selves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly 
master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town. 
... It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to be- 
lieve anything upon insufficient evidence." 

Ill 

All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by 
Clifford, with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the 
voice. Free will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of 
our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any 
one should thereupon assume that intellectual insight is what 
remains after wish and will and sentimental preference have 
taken wing, or that pure reason is what then settles our opinions, 
he would fly quite as directly in the teeth of the facts. 

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing na- 
ture is unable to bring to life again. But what has made them 
dead for us is for the most part a previous action of our willing 
nature of an antagonistic kind. When I say "willing nature," 
I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set 
up habits of behef that we cannot now escape from, — I mean 
all such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, 
imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste 
and set. As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, we 
hardly know how or why. Mr. Balfour gives the name of 
" authority " to all those influences, born of the intellectual cli- 
mate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive 



8o WILLIAM JAMES 

or dead. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules 
and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary 
progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting 
for "the doctrine of the immortal Monroe," all for no reasons 
worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more 
inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any dis- 
believer in them might possess. His unconventionality would 
probably have some grounds to show for its conclusions; but 
for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what 
makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping 
magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hun- 
dred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it 
can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credu- 
lity is criticized by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one 
else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. 
Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and 
that our minds and it are made for each other, — what is it but 
a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system 
backs us up ? We want to have a truth ; we want to believe 
that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us 
in a continually better and better position towards it ; and on 
this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a 
pyrrhonistic skeptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic 
find a reply ? No ! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition 
against another, — we willing to go in for life upon a trust or 
assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.^ 

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we 
have no use. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Chris- 
tian feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no 
use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman, on the 
contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of reasons 
good for staying there, because a priestly system is for him an 
organic need and delight. Why do so few " scientists " even 
look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they 

1 Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's Time atid Space, 
London, 1865. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 8i 

think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that 
even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together 
to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uni- 
formity of nature and all sorts of other things without which 
scientists cannot carry on their pursuits. But if this very m^n 
had been shown something which as a scientist he might do with 
telepathy, he might not only have examined the evidence, but 
even have found it good enough. This very law which the logi- 
cians would impose upon us — if I may give the name of logi- 
cians to those who would rule out our willing nature here — is 
based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all ele- 
ments for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, 
can find no use. 

Evidently, then, our nonintellectual nature does influence 
our convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions 
which run before and others which come after belief, and it is 
only the latter that are too late for the fair ; and they are not 
too late when the previous passional work has been already in 
their own direction. Pascal's argument, instead of being power- 
less, then seems a regular clincher, and is the last stroke needed 
to make our faith in masses and holy water complete. The 
state of things is evidently far from simple ; and pure insight 
and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the only 
things that really do produce our creeds. 

IV 

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed- up state of af- 
fairs, is to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathologi- 
cal, or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal 
element in making up our minds. The thesis I defend is, briefly 
stated, this : Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but 
must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a 
genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual 
grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, "Do not decide, 
but leave the question open,'' is itself a passional decision, — just 
like deciding yes or no, — and is attended with the same risk of los- 



82 WILLIAM JAMES 

ing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, 
soon become quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more 
of preliminary work. 



It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we 
are on " dogmatic " ground, — groimd, I mean, which leaves 
systematic philosophical skepticism altogether out of account. 
The postulate that there is truth, and that it is the destiny of 
our minds to attain it, we are deliberately resolving to make, 
though the skeptic will not make it. We part company with 
him, therefore, absolutely, at this point. But the faith that 
truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two 
ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist 
way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say 
that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know 
when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists 
think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know 
when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we 
know is another. One may hold to the first being possible with- 
out the second ; hence the empiricists and the absolutists, al- 
though neither of them is a skeptic in the usual philosophic sense 
of the term, show very different degrees of dogmatism in their 
lives. 

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist 
tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy 
the absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The 
characteristic sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies 
yield has mainly consisted in the conviction felt by each suc- 
cessive school or system that by it bottom-certitude had been 
attained. "Other philosophies are collections of opinions, 
mostly false ; my philosophy gives standing ground forever," 
— who does not recognize in this the keynote of every system 
worthy of the name ? A system, to be a system at all, must 
come as a dosed system, reversible in this or that detail, per- 
chance, but in its essential features never ! 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 83 

Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one 
wishes to find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elabo- 
rated this absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that 
of " objective evidence." If, for example, I am unable to doubt 
that I now exist before you, that two is less than three, or that 
if all men are mortal, then I am mortal too, it is because these 
things illumine my intellect irresistibly. The final ground of 
this objective evidence possessed by certain propositions is the 
adcequatio intellectus nostri cum re} The certitude it brings in- 
volves an aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum assensum ^ on the 
part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the subject a 
quietem in cognitione,^ when once the object is mentally received, 
that leaves no possibility of doubt behind ; and in the whole 
transaction nothing operates but the entitas ipsa ^ of the object 
and the entitas ipsa of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers 
dislike to talk in Latin, — indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms 
at all ; but at bottom our own state of mind is very much like 
this whenever we uncritically abandon ourselves : You believe 
in objective evidence, and I do. Of some things we feel that 
we are certain : we know, and we know that we do know. 
There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that 
strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swxpt 
the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest em- 
piricists among us are only empiricists on reflection : when left 
to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When 
the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 
" insufficient evidence," insufficiency is really the last thing they 
have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, 
only it makes the other way. They believe so completely 
in an antichristian order of the universe that there is no 
living option : Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the 
start. 

^ A correspondence of the perception with the object. — Editors. 
2 Capability of compelling unqualified assent. — Editors. 
^ Assured knowledge. — Editors. 
^ Actual existence. — Editors. 



84 WILLIAM JAMES 

VI 

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what 
in our quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about 
the fact ? Shall we espouse and indorse it ? Or shall we treat 
it as a weakness of our nature from which we must free our- 
selves, if we can ? 

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we 
can follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude 
are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this 
moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found ? I am, there- 
fore, myself a complete empiricist so far as my theory of human 
knowledge goes. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that 
we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, 
for only thus can our opinions grow more true ; but to hold any 
one of them — I absolutely do not care which — as if it never 
could be reinterpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tre- 
mendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole 
history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one inde- 
fectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic 
skepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present 
phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the 
bare starting point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff 
to be philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so 
many attempts at expressing what this stuff really is. And if 
we repair to our libraries what disagreement do we discover ! 
Where is a certainly true answer found? Apart from abstract 
propositions of comparison (such as two and two are the same 
as four), propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about 
concrete reality, we find no proposition ever regarded by any 
one as evidently certain that has not either been called a false- 
hood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by some one 
else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play 
but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as ZoUner and 
Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian 
logic by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 85 

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed 
upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of per- 
ception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium,"^ 
the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the 
race. Others make the perceptive moment its own test, — Des- 
cartes, for instance, with his clear and distinct ideas guaranteed 
by the veracity of God ; Reid with his " common sense " ; and 
Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment a priori. The in- 
conceivability of the opposite ; the capacity to be verified by 
sense ; the possession of complete organic unity or self-relation, 
realized when a thing is its own other, — are standards which, 
in turn, have been used. The much lauded objective evidence 
is never triumphantly there ; it is a mere aspiration or Grenz- 
begriff, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life. 
To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say that 
when you think them true and they are true, then their evidence 
is objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one's convic- 
tion that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand 
is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For 
what a contradictory array of opinions have objective evidence 
and absolute certitude been claimed ! The world is rational 
through and through, — its existence is an ultimate brute fact ; 
there is a personal God, — a personal God is inconceivable ; 
there is an extra-mental physical world immediately known, — 
the mind can only know its own ideas ; a moral imperative 
exists, — obligation is only the resultant of desires ; a permanent 
spiritual principle is in every one, — there are only shifting 
states of mind ; there is an endless chain of causes, — there is 
an absolute first cause ; an eternal necessity, — a freedom ; a 
purpose, — no purpose ; a primal One, — a primal Many ; a 
universal continuity, — an essential discontinuity in things ; an 
infinity, — no infinity. There is this, — there is that ; there 
is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely 
true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false ; and not an 
absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the 
1 Prevailing opinion. — Editors. 



86 WILLIAM JAMES 

trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even 
with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for 
knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remem- 
bers that the most striking practical application to life of the 
doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors 
of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than 
ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear. 

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give 
up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give 
up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on 
its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position 
towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences 
and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the 
way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, 
the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought ; for us the strength 
is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where 
it comes from, but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not 
to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to 
him : he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul ; passion 
may have whispered or accident suggested it ; but if the total 
drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means 
by its being true. 

VII 

One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries 
are done. There are two ways of looking at our duty in the 
matter of opinion, — ways entirely different, and yet ways about 
whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have 
shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we 
must avoid error, — these are our first and great command- 
ments as would-be knowers ; but they are not two ways of stat- 
ing an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. 
Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the 
truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believ- 
ing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely 
disbelieving B we necessarily believe A . We may in escaping 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 87 

B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad 
as 5 ; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, 
not even A. 

Believe truth ! Shun error ! — these, we see, are two ma- 
terially different laws ; and by choosing between them we may 
end, coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may 
regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of 
error as secondary ; or we may, on the other hand, treat the 
avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its 
chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which I have 
quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he 
tells us; keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by clos- 
ing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing 
lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being 
in error is a very small matter when compared with the bless- 
ings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times 
in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the 
chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible to go with 
Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty 
about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of 
our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as 
ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, 
"Better go without belief forever than Relieve a lie!" merely 
shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. 
He may be critical of many of his desires and fears, but this 
fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any one ques- 
tioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror 
of being duped ; but I can believe that worse things than being 
duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's ex- 
hortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is 
like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out 
of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are vic- 
tories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors 
are. surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where 
we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a 
certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive 



88 WILLIAM JAMES 

nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest 
thing for the empiricist philosopher. 

VIII 

And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our 
question. I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a 
matter of fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in 
our opinions, but that there are some options between opinions 
in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable 
and as a lawful determinant of our choice. 

I fear here that some of you, my hearers, will begin to scent 
danger, and lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion 
you have indeed had to admit as necessary, — we must think 
so as to avoid dupery, and we must think so as to gain truth ; 
but the surest path to those ideal consummations, you will 
probably consider, is from now onwards to take no further pas- 
sional step. 

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wher- 
ever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not mo- 
mentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and 
at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, 
by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has 
come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; 
and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is sel- 
dom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief 
at all. Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence 
attainable for the moment, because a judge's duty is to make law 
as well as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to 
me) few cases are worth spending much time over : . the great 
thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and 
got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective nature 
we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth ; and de- 
cisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on 
to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout 
the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite 
independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 89 

them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature 
theory need be faced. The questions here are always trivial 
options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living 
for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or false- 
hood is seldom forced. The attitude of skeptical balance is there- 
fore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What 
difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have 
or have not a theory of the Rontgen rays, whether we believe 
or not in mind stuff, or have a conviction about the causality 
of conscious states? It makes no difference. Such options 
are not forced on us. On every account it is better not to make 
them, but still keep weighing reasons pro et contra with an indif- 
ferent hand. 

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For pur- 
poses of discovery such indifference is to be less highly recom- 
mended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if 
the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths con- 
firmed had been kept out of the game. See, for example, the 
sagacity which Spencer and Weismann now display. On the 
other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, 
you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever 
in its results : he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. 
The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive ob- 
server, is always he whose eager interest in one side of the ques- 
tion is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become 
deceived.^ Science has organized this nervousness into a regu- 
lar technique, her so-called method of verification ; and she has 
fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say 
she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth 
as technically verified that interests her. The truth of truths 
might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline 
to touch it. Such truth as that, she might repeat with Clifford, 
would be stolen in defiance of her duty to mankind. Human 
passions, however, are stronger than technical rules. "Le coeur 

* Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, "The Wish to Believe," in his Witnesses 
to the Unseen (Macmillan & Co., 1893). 



go WILLIAM JAMES 

a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la raison ne connai pas; " ^ 
and however indifferent to all but the bare rules of the game the 
umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the concrete players 
who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually, each one 
of them, in love with some pet " live hypothesis " of his own. 
Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, 
the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, 
saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our 
ideal. 

The question next arises : Are there not somewhere forced 
options in our speculative questions, and can we (as men who 
may be interested at least as much in positively gaining truth as 
in merely escaping dupery) always wait with impunity till the 
coercive evidence shall have arrived? It seems a priori im- 
probable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs 
and powers as that. In the great boarding house' of nature, 
the cakes and the butter and the sirup seldom come out so even 
and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view them 
with scientific suspicion if they did. 

IX 

Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions 
whose solutiorTcannot wait for sensible proof. A moral ques- 
tion is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is 
good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what 
exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of 
what does not exist, we must consult ngt science, but what 
Pascal calls our heart. Science herself consults her heart when 
she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and cor- 
rection of false belief are the supreme goods for man. Chal- 
lenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, 
or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correc- 
tion bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn 
declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not 
having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences 
1 The heart has its reasons with which reason is unacquainted. — • Editors. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 91 

true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, mak- 
ing things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? 
How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not 
want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never 
make you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, 
will satisfy the head's play instincts much better than any rigor- 
ous idealism can. Some men (even at the student age) are so 
naturally cool hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has 
for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence 
the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The 
appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete and gulli- 
bility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he clings 
to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which 
(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is 
no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no 
more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism 
can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either 
kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or 
fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature adopts 
the doubting attitude ; but which of us is the wiser. Omniscience 
only knows. 

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class 
of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, 
states of mind between one man and another. Do you like me 
or not ? — for example. Whether you do or not depends, in 
countless instances, on whether I meet you halfway, am willing 
to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and ex- 
pectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking's 
existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But 
if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objec- 
tive evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the 
absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum meum,^ ten to one 
your Hking never comes. How many women's hearts are van- 
quished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they 
must love him ! he will not consent to the hypothesis that they 
1 For compelling my approval. — Editors. 



92 WILLIAM JAMES 

cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about 
that special truth's existence ; and so it is in innumerable cases 
of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, 
but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live 
hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their 
sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance ? 
His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates 
its own verification. 

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is 
what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with 
a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. 
Wherever a desired result is achieved by the cooperation of 
many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure con- 
sequence of the precursive faith in one another of those imme- 
diately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial 
system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condi- 
tion, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is 
even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually 
brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply be- 
cause the latter can count on one another, while each passenger 
fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot 
before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the 
whole earful would rise at once with us, we should each severally 
rise, and train robbing would never even be attempted. There 
are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a prelimi- 
nary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can 
help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should 
say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the " low- 
est kind of immorality" into which a thinking being can fall. 
Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend 
to regulate our lives ! 



In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based 
on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable 
thing. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 93 

But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, 
and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the 
question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Reli- 
gions differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the 
religious question we must make it very generic and broad. 
What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? 
Science says things are ; morality says some things are better 
than other things ; and religion says essentially two things. 

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, 
the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw 
the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. "Perfection 
is eternal," — this phrase of Charles Secretan seems a good way 
of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which 
obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all. 

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even 
now if we believe her first affirmation to be true. 

Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situa- 
tion are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be 
really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the 
outset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve 
a living option. If for any of you religion be an hypothesis that 
cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no 
farther. I speak to the " saving remnant " alone.) So proceed- 
ing, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous op- 
tion. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to 
lose by our nonbelief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion 
is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape 
the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, be- 
cause, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be un- 
true, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we posi- 
tively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate in- 
definitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not 
perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her 
home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel- 
possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one 
else ? Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option ; it is option 



94 WILLIAM JAMES 

of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than 
chance of error, — that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He 
is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is 
backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the 
believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. 
To preach skepticism to us as a duty until " sufficient evidence " 
for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when 
in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear 
of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope 
that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then ; 
it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And 
by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion war- 
ranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery 
through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, 
for one, can see no proof ; and I simply refuse obedience to the 
scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where 
my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose 
my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it 
be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher 
upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some 
business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of get- 
ting upon the winning side, — that chance depending, of course, 
on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional 
need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and 
right. 

All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic 
and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, 
religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most 
of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on 
our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more 
eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as 
having personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to 
us, but a Thou, if we are religious ; and any relation that may 
be possible from person to person might be possible here. For 
instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the 
universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 95 

small active centers on our own account. We feel, too, as if the 
appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good will, 
as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met 
the hypothesis halfway. To take a trivial illustration : just 
as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, 
asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one's 
word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness 
from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would 
earn, — so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling 
logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy- 
nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his 
only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This 
feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately 
believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be 
so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe 
the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of 
the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis ivere true in all its 
parts, including this one, then pure intellectuaUsm, with its 
veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity ; 
and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be 
logically required. I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to 
accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree 
to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for 
this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely 
prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds 
of truth were really there, would he an irrational rule. That for 
me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no 
matter what the kinds of truth might materially be. 

I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But 
sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink 
from radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the 
right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough 
to tempt our will. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is be- 
cause you have got away from the abstract logical point of view 
altogether, and are thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of 
some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead. 



96 WILLIAM JAMES . 

The freedom to " believe what we will " you apply to the case of 
some patent superstition ; and the faith you think of is the 
faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, " Faith is when you 
believe something that you know ain't true." I can only re- 
peat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to 
believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the 
individual cannot by itself resolve ; and living options never 
seem absurdities to him who has them to consider. When I 
look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete 
men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both prac- 
tically and theoretically it involves, then this command that 
we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and 
wait — acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion 
were not true ^ — till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect 
and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough, 
— this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever 
manufactured in the philosophic cave.^ Were we scholastic 
absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an infallible 
intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves 
disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to 
it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we 
are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know 
for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of 
idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for 
the bell. Indeed we may wait if we will, — I hope you do not 

1 Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to beHeve religion 
to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it 
to be true. The whole defense of religious faith hinges upon action. If the 
action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different 
from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a 
pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy 
is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of 
course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which 
specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike 
what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief. 

^ The " Idol of the Cave " is the form of fallacy in which the reason is 
overruled by individual preference. — Editors. 



THE WILL TO BELIEVE 97 

think that I am denying that, — but if we do so, we do so 
at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we acl, 
taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes 
to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, 
on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one an- 
other's mental freedom : then only shall we bring about the 
intellectual republic ; then only shall we have that spirit of 
inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, 
and which is empiricism's glory ; then only shall we live and let 
live, in speculative as well as in practical things. 

I began by a reference to Fitz- James Stephen ; let me end by 
a quotation from him. " What do you think of yourself ? 
What do you think of the world ? . . . These are questions 
with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are 
riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal 
with them. ... In all important transactions of life we have to 
take a leap in the dark. ... If we decide to leave the riddles 
unanswered, that is a choice ; if we waver in our answer, that, 
too, is a choice : but whatever choice we make, we make it at 
our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God 
and the future, no one can prevent him ; no one can show be- 
yond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks 
otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can 
prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best ; 
and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a 
mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, 
through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which 
may be deceptive. If we stand still, we shall be frozen to death. 
If we take the wrong road, we shall be dashed to pieces. We do 
not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must 
we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, 
hope for the best, and take what comes. ... If death ends 
all, we cannot meet death better." ^ 

^Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition (London, 1874). 



V 

OF THE LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND 
DISCUSSION 

John Stuart Mill 

[John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), eldest son of James Mill, the utilitarian, 
was a logician, economist, and philosopher, whose influence on the 
social and political movements of the third quarter of the nineteenth cen- 
tury can hardly be overestimated. Brought up by his father after the 
strictest code of the stern utihtarian school, he later became the leader of 
the group of thinkers who were to continue in modified form the traditions 
of this older school of economists. He was active in the political discussions 
of the day, was editor and joint proprietor of the London and Westminster 
Review for some years, served one term in Parliament, and throughout his 
life wrote and labored unceasingly for social and political reforms and for the 
dissemination of the principles he held to be essential to human happiness. 

Of all Mill's writing, the volume On Liberty (published 1859), of 
which the following selection forms the second chapter, is regarded as the 
most carefully prepared and highly polished. It contains the clearest statement 
of the author's modified individualism, which maintained that every man 
should be allowed all liberty that did not interfere with that of his neighbor ; 
and, like the Subjection of Women, a chapter of which appears in this volume, 
it illustrates the author's interest in the practical aspects of his question. The 
purpose of the essay, as declared in the introductory chapter, is to assert the 
principle of individual liberty in thought and action, in order that a restraint 
may be placed upon the growing tendency of the majority to tyrannize, an 
evil which has supplanted the old tyranny of rulers. Since Mill's day the 
trend of political opinion has been away from individualism; but among 
his contemporaries the volume had great influence. A suggestive and 
elaborate attack on Mill's position may be found in Sir James Fitzjames 
Stephen's Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (1873).] 

The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defense would 
be necessary of the " Kberty of the press" as one of the securi- 
ties against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argvasient, we 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 99 

may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature 
or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to pre- 
scribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what 
arguments they shall be allowed to hear. This aspect of the 
question, besides, has been so often and so triumphantly en- 
forced by preceding writers, that it needs not be specially in- 
sisted on in this place. Though the law of England, on the sub- 
ject of the press, is as servile to this day as it was in the time of 
the Tudors, there is little danger of its being actually put in force 
against political discussion, except during some temporary panic, 
when fear of insurrection drives ministers and judges from their 
propriety; and, speaking generally, it is not, in constitutional 
countries, to be apprehended that the government, whether 
completely responsible to the people or not, will often attempt to 
control the expression of opinion, except when in doing so it 
makes itself the organ of the general intolerance of the public. 
Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one 
with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coer- 
cion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. 
But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either 
by themselves or by their government. The power itself is ille- 
gitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the 
worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in ac- 
cordance with public opinion than when in opposition to it. If 
all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person 
were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justi- 
fied in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, 
would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a per- 
sonal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be ob- 
structed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it 
would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only 
on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing 
the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race ; 
posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dis- 
sent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the 
opinior ' right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchang- 



lOO JOHN STUART MILL 

ing error for truth ; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a 
benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, 
produced by its collision with error. 

It is necessary to consider separately these two hypotheses, 
each of which has a distinct branch of the argument correspond- 
ing to it. We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeav- 
oring to stifle is a false opinion ; and if we were sure, stifling it 
would be an evil still. 

First : the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by author- 
ity may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of 
course, deny its truth ; but they are not infallible. They have no 
authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude 
every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hear- 
ing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to as- 
sume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. 
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its 
condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, 
not the worse for being common. 

Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their 
fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judg- 
ment, which is always allowed to it in theory ; for while every one 
well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take 
any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the sup- 
position that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may 
be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge 
themselves to be liable. Absolute princes, or others who are 
accustomed to unlimited deference, usually feel this complete 
confidence in their own opinions on nearly all subjects. People 
more happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions dis- 
puted, and are not wholly unused to be set right when they are 
wrong, place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their 
opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they 
habitually defer ; for in proportion to a man's want of confidence 
in his own solitary judgment, does he usually repose, with im- 
plicit trust, on the infallibility of " the world " in general. And the 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION loi 

world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he 
comes in contact ; his party, his sect, his church, his class of 
society : the man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal 
and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive 
as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in this collec- 
tive authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, 
countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and 
even now think, the exact reverse. He devolves upon his own 
world the responsibility of being in the right against the dissen- 
tient worlds of other people ; and it never troubles him that mere 
accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the ob- 
ject of his reliance, and that the same causes which make him a 
Churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a 
Confucian in Pekin. Yet it is as evident in itself, as any amount 
of argument can make it, that ages are no more infallible than 
individuals ; every age having held many opinions which sub- 
sequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd ; and it Is 
as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by 
future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the 
present. 

The objection likely to be made to this argument would prob- 
ably take some such form as the following: There is no greater 
assumption of infallibility in forbidding the propagation of error 
than in any other thing which is done by public authority on its 
own judgment and responsibility. Judgment is given to men 
that they may use it. Because it may be used erroneously, are 
men to be told that they ought not to use it at all ? To prohibit 
what they think pernicious, is not claiming exemption from error, 
but fulfilling the duty incumbent on them, although fallible, of 
acting on their conscientious conviction. If we were never to act 
on our opinions, because those opinions may be wrong, we should 
leave all our interests uncared for, and all our duties unperformed. 
An objection which applies to all conduct, can be no valid objec- 
tion to any conduct in particular. It is the duty of governments, 
and of individuals, to form -the truest opinions they can ; to form 
them carefully, and never impose them upon others unless they 



102 JOHN STUART MILL 

are quite sure of being right. But when they are sure (such 
reasoners may say), it is not conscientiousness but cowardice to 
shrink from acting on their opinions, and allow doctrines which 
they honestly think dangerous to the welfare of mankind, either 
in this life or in another, to be scattered abroad without re- 
straint, because other people, in less enlightened times, have per- 
secuted opinions now believed to be true. Let us take care, it 
may be said, not to make the same mistake; but governments 
and nations have made mistakes in other things, which are not 
denied to be fit subjects for the exercise of authority; they have 
laid on bad taxes, made unjust wars. Ought we therefore to lay 
on no taxes, and, under whatever provocation, make no wars ? 
Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. 
There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assur- 
ance sufficient for the purposes of human life. We may, and 
must, assume our opinion to be true for the guidance of our own 
conduct ; and it is assuming no more when we forbid bad men to 
pervert society by the propagation of opinions which we regard 
as false and pernicious. 

I answer that it is assuming very much more. There is the 
greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, be- 
cause, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been 
refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting 
its refutation. Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving 
our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its 
truth for purposes of action ; and on no other terms can a being 
with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right. 

When we consider either the history of opinion, or the ordinary 
conduct of human life, to what is it to be ascribed that the one 
and the other are no worse than they are ? Not certainly to the 
inherent force of the human understanding ; for, on any matter 
not self-evident, there are ninety-nine persons totally incapable of 
judging of it, for one who is capable ; and the capacity of the 
hundredth person is only comparative ; for the majority of the 
eminent men of every past generation held many opinions now 
known to be erroneous, and did or approved numerous things 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 103 

which no one will now justify. Why is it, then, that there is on 
the whole a preponderance among mankind of rational opinions 
and rational conduct ? If there really is this preponderance, — 
which there must be, unless human affairs are, and have always 
been, in an almost desperate state, — ■ it is owing to a quality of 
the human mind, the source of everything respectable in man 
either as an intellectual or as a moral being ; namely, that his er- 
rors are corrigible. He is capable of rectifying his mistakes, by 
discussion and experience. Not by experience alone. There 
must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted. 
Wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argu- 
ment; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the 
mind, must be brought before it. Very few facts are able to tell 
their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning. 
The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, de- 
pending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is 
wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of set- 
ting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any per- 
son whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it 
become so ? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his 
opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen 
to all that could be said against him ; to profit by as much of it as 
was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, 
the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the 
only way in which a human being can make some approach to 
knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said 
about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all 
modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. 
No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this ; 
nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any 
other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing 
his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from 
causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the 
only stable foundation for a just reliance on it ; for, being cogni- 
zant of all that can, at least obviously, be said against him, and 
having taken up his position against all gainsay ers, — knowing 



104 JOHN STUART MILL 

that he has sought for objections and difficulties, instead of 
avoiding them, and has shut out no light which can be thrown 
upon the subject from any quarter, — he has a right to think his 
judgment better than that of any person, or any multitude, who 
have not gone through a similar process. 

It is not too much to require that what the wisest of mankind, 
those who are best entitled to trust their own judgment, find 
"necessary to warrant their relying on it, should be submitted to 
by that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish 
individuals, called the public. The most intolerant of churches, 
the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, 
admits, and listens patiently to, a "devil's advocate." The holi- 
est of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honors, 
until all that the devil could say against him is known and 
weighed. If even the Newtonian philosophy were not permitted 
to be questioned, mankind could not feel as complete assurance 
of its truth as they now do. The beliefs which we have most 
warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invita- 
tion to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the chal- 
lenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are 
far enough from certainty still ; but we have done the best that 
the existing state of human reason admits of ; we have neglected 
nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us : if the 
lists are kept open, we may hope that if there be a better truth, it 
will be found when the human mind is capable of receiving it ; 
and in the meantime we may rely on having attained such ap- 
proach to truth as is possible in our own day. This is the 
amount of certainty attainable by a fallible being, and this the 
sole way of attaining it. 

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the argu- 
ments for free discussion, but object to their being " pushed to an 
extreme" ; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an ex- 
treme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they 
should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility, when 
they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all sub- 
jects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some partic- 



I 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 105 

ular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned 
because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is 
certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one 
who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not per- 
mitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with 
us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the 
other side. 

In the present age — which has been described as "destitute 
of faith, but terrified at skepticism" — in which people feel sure, 
not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not 
know what to do without them — the claims of an opinion to be 
protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, 
as on its importance to society. There are, it is alleged, certain 
beliefs so useful, not to say indispensable, to well-being that it is 
as much the duty of governments to uphold those beliefs, as to 
protect any other of the interests of society. In a case of such 
necessity, and so directly in the line of their duty, something less 
than infallibility may, it is maintained, warrant, and even bind, 
governments, to act on their own opinion, confirmed by the gen- 
eral opinion of mankind. It is also often argued, and still oftener 
thought, that none but bad men would desire to Weaken these 
salutary beliefs ; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in 
restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would 
wish to practice. This mode of thinking makes the justification 
of restraints on discussion not a question of the truth of doctrines, 
but of their usefulness ; and flatters itself by that means to escape 
the responsibility of claiming to be an infallible judge of opinions. 
But those who thus satisfy themselves do not perceive that the 
assumption of infallibility is merely shifted from one point to an- 
other. The usefulness of an opinion is itself matter of opinion : 
as disputable, as open to discussion, and requiring discussion as 
much, as the opinion itself. There is the same need of an infal- 
lible judge of opinions to decide an opinion to be noxious, as to 
decide it to be false, unless the opinion condemned has full oppor- 
tunity of defending itself. And it will not do to say that the her- 
etic may be allowed to maintain the utility or harmlessness of 



io6 JOHN STUART MILL 

his opinion, though forbidden to maintain its truth. The truth 
of an opinion is part of its utility. If we would know whether 
or not it is desirable that a proposition should be believed, 
is it possible to exclude the consideration of whether or not 
it is true? In the opinion, not of bad men, but of the best 
men, no belief which is contrary to truth can be really useful : 
and can you prevent such men from urging that plea, when 
they are charged with culpability for denying some doctrine 
which they are told is useful, but which they believe to be 
false? Those who are on the side of received opinions never 
fail to take all possible advantage of this plea ; you do not find 
them handling the question of utility as if it could be completely 
abstracted from that of truth; on the contrary, it is, above all, 
because their doctrine is "the truth," that the knowledge or the 
belief of it is held to be so indispensable. There can be no fair 
discussion of the question of usefulness, when an argument so 
vital may be employed on one side, but not on the other. And in 
point of fact, when law or public feeling do not permit the truth 
of an opinion to be disputed, they are just as little tolerant of a 
denial of its usefulness. The utmost they allow is an exten- 
uation of its absolute necessity, or of the positive guilt of reject- 
ing it. 

In order more fully to illustrate the mischief of denying a hear- 
ing to opinions because we, in our own judgment, have con- 
demned them, it will be desirable to fix down the discussion to a 
concrete case ; and I choose, by preference, the cases which are 
least favorable to me — in which the argument against freedom 
of opinion, both on the score of truth and on that of utility, is con- 
sidered the strongest. Let the opinions impugned be the belief 
in a God and in a future state, or any of the commonly received 
doctrines of morality. To fight the battle on such ground, gives 
a great advantage to an unfair antagonist ; since he will be sure 
to say (and many who have no desire to be unfair will say it in- 
ternally), Are these the doctrines which you do not deem suffi- 
ciently certain to be taken under the protection of law ? Is the 
belief in a God one of the opinions, to feel sure of which you hold 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 107 

to be assuming infallibility? But I must be permitted to ob- 
serve, that it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it 
may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the under- 
taking to decide that question for others, without allowing them 
to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce 
and reprobate this pretension not the less, if put forth on the 
side of my most solemn convictions. However positive any one's 
persuasion may be, not only of the falsity, but of the pernicious 
consequences — not only of the pernicious consequences, but (to 
adopt expressions which I altogether condemn) the immorality 
and impiety of an opinion ; yet if, in pursuance of that private 
judgment, though backed by the public judgment of his country 
or his contemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard 
in its defense, he assumes infallibility. And so far from the as- 
sumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the 
opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others 
in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on 
which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes 
which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity. It is 
among such that we find the instances memorable in history, 
when the arm of the law has been employed to root out the best 
men and the noblest doctrines ; with deplorable success as to the 
men, though some of the doctrines have survived to be (as if in 
mockery) invoked, in defense of similar conduct towards those 
who dissent from them, or from their received interpretation. 

Mankind can hardly be too often reminded that there was once 
a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities 
and public opinion of his time there took place a memorable col- 
lision. Born in an age and country abounding in individual great- 
ness, this man has been handed down to us by those who best 
knew both him and the age, as the most virtuous man in it ; while 
we know him as the head and prototype of all subsequent teachers 
of virtue, the source equally of the lofty inspiration of Plato and 
the judicious utilitarianism of Aristotle, "i maestri di color che 
sanno,^' ^ the two headsprings of ethical as of all other philosophy. 
1 The teachers of those who know. — Editors. 



io8 JOHN STUART MILL 

This acknowledged master of all the eminent thinkers who have 
since lived — whose fame, still growing after more than two 
thousand years , all but outweighs the whole remainder of the 
names which make his native city illustrious — was put to death 
by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and 
immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognized by the 
state; indeed his accuser asserted (see the Apologia^) that he 
believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his doctrines 
and instructions, a "corruptor of youth." Of these charges the 
tribunal, there is every ground for believing, honestly found him 
guilty, and condemned the man who probably of all then born had 
deserved best of mankind, to be put to death as a criminal. 

To pass from this to the only other instance of judicial in- 
iquity, the mention of which, after the condemnation of Socrates, 
would not be an anticlimax : the event which took place on Cal- 
vary rather more than eighteen hundred years ago. The man 
who left on the memory of those who witnessed his life and con- 
versation such an impression of his moral grandeur that eighteen 
subsequent centuries have done homage to him as the Almighty 
in person, was ignominiously put to death, as what ? As a blas- 
phemer. Men did not merely mistake their benefactor, they mis- 
took him for the exact contrary of what he was, and treated 
him as that prodigy of impiety, which they themselves are now 
held to be, for their treatment of him. The feelings with which 
mankind now regard these lamentable transactions, especially 
the later of the two, render them extremely unjust in their judg- 
ment of the unhappy actors. These were, to all appearance, not 
bad men — not worse than men commonly are, but rather the 
contrary ; men who possessed in a full, or somewhat more than a 
full, measure the religious, moral, and patriotic feelings of their 
time and people : the very kind of men who, in all times, our own 
included, have every chance of passing through life blameless 
and respected. The high priest who rent his garments when the 
words were pronounced, which, according to all the ideas of his 

^ Plato's Apology, which purports to give Socrates's own defense at the 
trial in which he was condemned. — Editors. 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 109 

country, constituted the blackest guilt, was in all probability 
quite as sincere in his horror and indignation as the generality 
of respectable and pious men now are in the religious and moral 
sentiments they profess ; and most of those who now shudder at 
his conduct, if they had lived in his time, and been born Jews, 
would have acted precisely as he did. Orthodox Christians who 
are tempted to think that those who stoned to death the first 
martyrs must have been worse men than they themselves are, 
ought to remember that one of those persecutors was Saint 
Paul. 

Let us add one more example, the most striking of all, if the 
impressiveness of an error is measured by the wisdom and virtue 
of him who falls into it. If ever any one, possessed of power, had 
grounds for thinking himself the best and most enlightened 
among his contemporaries, it was the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. 
Absolute monarch of the whole civilized world, he preserved 
through life not only the most unblemished justice, but, what was 
less to be expected from his Stoical breeding, the tenderest 
heart. The few failings which are attributed to him were all on 
the side of indulgence; while his writings, the highest ethical 
product of the ancient mind, differ scarcely perceptibly, if they 
differ at all, from the most characteristic teachings of Christ. 
This man, a better Christian in all but the dogmatic sense of. the 
word, than almost any of the ostensibly Christian sovereigns 
who have since reigned, persecuted Christianity. Placed at the 
summit of all the previous attainments of humanity, with an 
open, unfettered intellect, and a character which led him of him- 
self to embody in his moral writings the Christian ideal, he yet 
failed to see that Christianity was to be a good and not an evil 
to the world, with his duties to which he was so deeply penetrated. 
Existing society he knew to be in a deplorable state. But such 
as it was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held together, 
and prevented from being worse, by belief and reverence of the 
received divinities. As a ruler of mankind, he deemed it his 
duty not to suffer society to fall in pieces ; and saw not how, if 
its existing ties were removed, any others could be formed which 



no JOHN STUART MILL 

could again knit it together. The new reHgion openly aimed at 
dissolving these ties; unless, therefore, it was his duty to adopt 
that religion, it seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inas- 
much, then, as the theology of Christianity did not appear to him 
true or of divine origin ; inasmuch as this strange history of a 
crucified God was not credible to him, and a system which pur- 
ported to rest entirely upon a foundation to him so wholly un- 
believable could not be foreseen by him to be that renovating 
agency which, after all abatements, it has in fact proved to be, — 
the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and rulers, under 
a solemn sense of duty, authorized the persecution of Christianity. 
To my mind this is one of the most tragical facts in all history. 
It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of 
the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted 
as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus 
Aurelius instead of those of Constantine. But it would be 
equally unjust to him and false to truth, to deny that no one plea 
which can be urged for punishing anti-Christian teaching was 
wanting to Marcus Aurelius for punishing, as he did, the propa- 
gation of Christianity. No Christian more firmly believes that 
Atheism is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than 
Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity; he 
who, of all men then living, might have been thought the most 
capable of appreciating it. Unless any one who approves of 
punishment for the promulgation of opinions, flatters himself 
that he is a wiser and better man than Marcus Aurelius — more 
deeply versed in the wisdom of his time, more elevated in his in- 
tellect above it — more earnest in his search for truth, or more 
single-minded in his devotion to it when found, — let him ab- 
stain from that assumption of the joint infallibility of himself and 
the multitude, which the great Antoninus made with so unfortu- 
nate a result. 

Aware of the impossibility of defending the use of punishment 
for restraining irreligious opinions, by any argument which will 
not justify Marcus Antoninus, the enemies of religious freedom, 
when hard pressed, occasionally accept this consequence, and say, 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION in 

with Dr. Johnson, that the persecutors of Christianity were in the 
right ; that persecution is an ordeal through which truth ought 
to pass, and always passes successfully, legal penalties being, in 
the end, powerless against truth, though sometimes beneficially 
effective against mischievous errors. This is a form of the argu- 
ment for religious intolerance, sufficiently remarkable not to be 
passed without notice. 

A theory which maintains that truth may justifiably be per- 
secuted because persecution cannot possibly do it any harm 
cannot be charged with being intentionally hostile to the recep- 
tion of new truths ; but we cannot commend the generosity of 
its dealing with the persons to whom mankind are indebted for 
them. To discover to the world something which deeply con- 
cerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant ; to prove to it 
that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or 
spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can 
render to his fellow creatures, and in certain cases, as in those 
of the early Christians and of the Reformers, those who think 
with Dr. Johnson believe it to have been the most precious gift 
which could be bestowed on mankind. That the authors of 
such splendid benefits should be requited by martyrdom ; that 
their reward should be to be dealt with as the vilest of criminals, 
is not, upon this theory, a deplorable error and misfortune, for 
which humanity should mourn in sackcloth and ashes, but the 
normal and justifiable state of things. The propounder of a 
new truth, according to this doctrine, should stand, as stood, in 
the legislation of the Locrians, the proposer of a new law, with 
a halter round his neck, to be instantly tightened if the public 
assembly did not, on hearing his reasons, then and there adopt 
his proposition. People who defend this mode of treating bene- 
factors cannot be supposed to set much value on the benefit ; 
and I believe this view of the subject is mostly confined to the 
sort of persons who think that new truths may have been desir- 
able once, but that we have had enough of them now. 

But, indeed, the dictum that truth always triumphs over per- 
secution, is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat 



112 JOHN STUART MILL 

after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which 
all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth 
put down by persecution. If not suppressed forever, it may be 
thrown back for centuries. To speak only of religious opinions : 
the Reformation broke out at least twenty times before Luther, 
and was put down. Arnold of Brescia was put down. Fra Dol- 
cino was put* down. Savonarola was put down. The Albigeois 
were put down. The Vaudois were put down. The Lollards 
were put down. The Hussites were put down. Even after the 
era of Luther, wherever persecution was persisted in, it was suc- 
cessful. In Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protes- 
tantism was rooted out ; and, most likely, would have been so in 
England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died. Per- 
secution has always succeeded, save where the heretics were too 
strong a party to be effectually persecuted. No reasonable per- 
son can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in 
the Roman Empire. It spread and became predominant, be- 
cause the persecutions were only occasional, lasting but a short 
time, and separated by long intervals of almost undisturbed 
propagandism. It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, 
merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of pre- 
vailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more 
zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient 
application of legal or even of social penalties will generally suc- 
ceed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage 
which truth has, consists in this : that when an opinion is true, 
it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the 
course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover 
it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from 
favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made 
such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. 
It will be said, that we do not now put to death the introducers 
^f new opinions ; we are not like our fathers who slew the proph- 
ets, we even build sepulchers to them. It is true we no longer 
put heretics to death: and the amount of penal infliction which 
modern feeling would probably tolerate, even against the most 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 113 

obnoxious opinions, is not sufficient to extirpate them. But let 
us not flatter ourselves that we are yet free from the stain even 
of legal persecution. Penalties for opinion, or at least for its 
expression, still exist by law ; and their enforcement is not, even 
in these times, so unexampled as to make it at all incredible that 
they may some day be revived in full force. In the year 1857, 
at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate 
man, said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all relations of 
life, was sentenced to twenty-one months' imprisonment, for 
uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concern- 
ing Christianity. Within a month of the same time, at the Old 
Bailey, two persons, on two separate occasions, were rejected as 
jurymen, and one of them grossly insulted by the judge and by 
one of the counsel, because they honestly declared that they 
had no theological belief ; and a third, a foreigner, for the same 
reason, was denied justice against a thief. This refusal of re- 
dress took place in virtue of the legal doctrine, that no person 
can be allowed to give evidence in a court of justice, who does 
not profess belief in a God (any god is sufficient) and in a future 
state ; which is equivalent to declaring such persons to be out- 
laws, excluded from the protection of the tribunals ; who may 
not only be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if no one but 
themselves, or persons of similar opinions, be present, but any 
one else may be robbed or assaulted with impunity, if the proof 
of the fact depends on their evidence. The assumption on which 
this is grounded, is that the oath is worthless, of a person who 
does not believe in a future state ; a proposition which betokens 
much ignorance of history in those who assent to it (since it 
is historically true that a large proportion of infidels in all ages 
have been persons of distinguished integrity and honor) ; and 
would be maintained by no one who had the smallest conception 
how many of the persons in greatest repute with the world, both 
for virtues and for attainments, are well known, at least to their 
intimates, to be unbelievers. The rule, besides, is suicidal, and 
cuts away its own foundation. Under pretense that atheists 
must be liars, it admits the testimony of all atheists who are 



114 JOHN STUART MILL 

willing to lie, and rejects only those who brave the obloquy of 
publicly confessing a detested creed rather than affirm a false- 
hood. A rule thus self-convicted of absurdity, so far as regards 
its professed purpose, can be kept in force only as a badge of 
hatred, a relic of persecution ; a persecution, too, having the 
peculiarity that the qualification for undergoing it is the being 
clearly proved not to deserve it. The rule, and the theory it 
implies, are hardly less insulting to believers than to infidels. 
For if he who does not believe in a future state necessarily lies, 
it follows that they who do believe are only prevented from lying, 
if prevented they are, by the fear of hell. We will not do the 
authors and abettors of the rule the injury of supposing that the 
conception which they have formed of Christian virtue is drawn 
from their own consciousness. 

These, indeed, are but rags and remnants of persecution, and 
may be thought to be not so much an indication of the wish to 
persecute as an example of that very frequent infirmity of Eng- 
lish minds, which makes them take a preposterous pleasure in 
the assertion of a bad principle, when they are no longer bad 
enough to desire to carry it really into practice. But unhappily 
there is no security in the state of the public mind that the sus- 
pension of worse forms of legal persecution, which has lasted for 
about the space of a generation, will continue. In this age the 
quiet surface of routine is as often ruffled by attempts to resus- 
citate past evils, as to introduce new benefits. What is boasted 
of at the present time as the revival of religion is always, in 
narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of 
bigotry ; and where there is the strong permanent leaven of in- 
tolerance in the feelings of a people, which at all times abides 
in the middle classes of this country, it needs but little to pro- 
voke them into actively persecuting those whom they have never 
ceased to think proper objects of persecution. For it is this: 
it is the opinions men entertain, and the feelings they cherish, 
respecting those who disown the beliefs they deem important, 
which makes this country not a place of mental freedom. For a 
long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 115 

they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is 
really effective, and so effective is it that the profession of opin- 
ions which are under the law of society is much less common 
in England than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those 
which incur risk of judicial punishment. In respect to all persons 
but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them indepen- 
dent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, 
is as efficacious as law ; men might as well be imprisoned, as 
excluded from the means of earning their bread. Those whose 
bread is already secured, and who desire no favors from men in 
power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing 
to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill- 
thought of and ill-spoken of, and this it ought not to require 
a very heroic mold to enable them to bear. There is no room 
for any appeal ad misericordiam ^ in behalf of such persons. But 
though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think 
differently from us, as it was formerly our custom to do, it may 
be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment 
of them. Socrates was put to death, but the Socratic philosophy 
rose like the sun in heaven, and spread its illumination over the 
whole intellectual firmament. Christians were cast to the lions, 
but the Christian church grew up a stately and spreading tree, 
overtopping the older and less vigorous growths, and stifling them 
by its shade. Our merely social intolerance kills no one, roots 
out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain 
from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretical 
opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each dec- 
ade or generation ; they never blaze out far and wide, but con- 
tinue to smolder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious 
persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the 
general affairs of mankind with either a true or a deceptive light. 
And thus is kept up a state of things very satisfactory to some 
minds, because, without the unpleasant process of fining or im- 
prisoning anybody, it maintains all prevailing opinions outwardly 
undisturbed, while it does not absolutely interdict the exercise of 
^ To sympathy. — Editors. 



ii6 JOHN STUART MILL 

reason by dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought. A 
convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and 
keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. 
But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the 
sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind. A state 
of things in which a large portion of the most active and inquir- 
ing intellects find it advisable to keep the genuine principles 
and grounds of their convictions within their own breasts, and 
attempt, in what they address to the public, to fit as much as 
they can of their own conclusions to premises which they have 
internally renounced, cannot send forth the open, fearless char- 
acters, and logical, consistent intellects who once adorned the 
thinking world. The sort of men who can be looked for under 
it are either mere conformers to commonplace, or timeservers for 
truth, whose arguments on all great subjects are meant for their 
hearers, and are not those which have convinced themselves. 
Those who avoid this alternative, do so by narrowing their 
thoughts and interest to things which can be spoken of without 
venturing within the region of principles ; that is, to small prac- 
tical matters, which would come right of themselves, if but the 
minds of mankind were strengthened and enlarged, and which 
will never be made effectually right until then; while that which 
would strengthen and enlarge men's minds, free and daring 
speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned. 

Those in whose eyes this reticence on the part of heretics is 
no evil, should consider in the first place that in consequence of 
it there is never any fair and thorough discussion of heretical 
opinions ; and that such of them as could not stand such a dis- 
cussion, though they may be prevented from spreading, do not 
disappear. But it is not the minds of heretics that are deterio- 
rated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end 
in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those 
who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is 
cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. Who 
can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promis- 
ing intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not f ol- 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 117 

low out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest 
it should land them in something which would admit of being 
considered irreligious or immoral ? Among them we may occa- 
sionally see some man of deep conscientiousness, and subtle and 
refined understanding, who spends a life in sophisticating with 
an intellect which he cannot silence, and exhausts the resources 
of ingenuity in attempting to reconcile the promptings of his 
conscience and reason with orthodoxy, which yet he does not, 
perhaps, to the end succeed in doing. No one can be a great 
thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first 
duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead. 
^' Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study 
and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of O^ 
those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves 
to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, 
that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as 
much, and even more indispensable, to enable average human 
beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. 
There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in 
a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has 
been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere, an intellectually active 
people. Where any people has made a temporary approach to 
such a character, it has been because the dread of heterodox 
speculation w^as for a time suspended. Where there is a tacit 
convention that principles are not to be disputed ; where the dis- 
cussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity 
is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally 
high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of his- 
tory so remarkable. Never when controversy avoided the sub- 
jects which are large and important enough to kindle enthusiasm 
was the mind of a people stirred up from its foundations, and ^ 
the impulse given which raised even persons of the most ordinary 
intellect to something of the dignity of thinking beings. Of such 
we have had an example in the condition of Europe during the 
times immediately following the Reformation ; another, though 
limited to the Continent and to a more cultivated class, in the 



ii8 JOHN STUART MILL 

' speculative movement of the latter half of the eighteenth cen- 
tury ; and a third, of still briefer duration, in the intellectual 
fermentation of Germany during the Goethian and Fichtean 
period. These periods differed widely in the particular opinions 
which they developed ; but were alike in this, that during all 
u three the yoke of authority was broken. In each, an old mental 
^ despotism had been thrown off, and no new one had yet taken 
its place. The impulse given at these three periods has made 
Europe what it now is. Every single improvement which has 
taken place either in the human mind or in institutions, may be 
traced distinctly, to one or other of them. Appearances have for 
some time indicated that all three impulses are well nigh spent ; 
and we can expect no fresh start, until we again assert our mental 
freedom. 

Let us now pass to the second division of the argument, and 
dismissing the supposition that any of the received opinions may 
be false, let us assume them to be true, and examine into the 
worth of the manner in which they are likely to be held, when 
their truth is not freely and openly canvassed. However un- 
willingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the pos- 
sibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by 
the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, 
frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead 
dogma, not a living truth. 

There is a class of persons (happily not quite so numerous as 
formerly) who think it enough if a person assents undoubtingly 
to what they think true, though he has no knowledge whatever of 
the grounds of the opinion, and could not make a tenable defense 
of it against the most superficial objections. Such persons, if 
they can once get their creed taught from authority, naturally 
think that no good, and some harm, comes of its being allowed to 
be questioned. Where their influence prevails, they make it 
nearly impossible for the received opinion to be rejected wisely 
and considerately, though it may still be rejected rashly and ig- 
norantly ; for to shut out discussion entirely is seldom possible, 
and when it once gets in, beliefs not grounded on conviction are 






LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 119 

apt to give way before the slightest semblance of an argument. 
Waiving, however, this possibility, — assuming that the true opin- 
ion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief inde- 
pendent of, and proof against, argument, — this is not the way in 
which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not 
knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition 
the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a 
truth. 

If the intellect and judgment of mankind ought to be culti- 
vated, a thing which Protestants at least do not deny, on what can 
these faculties be more appropriately exercised by any one than 
on the things which concern him so much that it is considered 
necessary for him to hold opinions on them ? If the cultivation 
of the understanding consists in one thing more than in another, 
it is surely in learning the grounds of one's own opinions. What- 
ever people believe on subjects on which it is of the first impor- 
tance to believe rightly, they ought to be able to defend against 
at least the common objections. But, some one may say, "Let 
them be taught the grounds of their opinions. It does not follow 
that opinions must be merely parroted because they are never 
heard controverted. Persons who learn geometry do not simply 
commit the theorems to memory, but understand and learn like- 
wise the demonstrations ; and it would be absurd to say that they 
remain ignorant of the grounds of geometrical truths, because 
they never hear any one deny, and attempt to disprove them." 
Undoubtedly : and such teaching suffices on a subject like math- 
ematics, where there is nothing at all to be said on the wrong 
side of the question. The peculiarity of the evidence of math- 
ematical truths is, that all the argument is on one side. There 
are no objections, and no answers to objections. But on every 
subject on which difference of opinion is possible, the truth de- 
pends on a balance to be struck between two sets of conflicting 
reasons. Even in natural philosophy there is always some other 
explanation possible of the same facts ; some geocentric theory 
instead of heliocentric, some phlogiston instead of oxygen ; and 
it has to be shown why that other theory cannot be the true one; 



120 JOHN STUART MILL 

and until this is shown, and until we know how it is shown, we do 
not understand the grounds of our opinion. But when we turn 
to subjects infinitely more complicated — to morals, religion, 
politics, social relations, and the business of life — three fourths 
of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling 
the appearances which favor some opinion different from it. The 
greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that 
he always studied his adversary's case with as great, if not with 
still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practiced 
as the means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all 
who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. / He who 
knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His 
reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute 
them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the 
opposite side ; if he does not so much as know what they are, he 
has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational posi- 
tion for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he con- 
tents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, 
like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most 
inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments 
of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state 
them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That 
is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into 
real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them 
from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in 
earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know 
them in their most plausible and persuasive form ; he must feel 
the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the sub- 
ject has to encounter and dispose of ; else he will never really 
possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes 
that difficulty. Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called 
educated men are in this condition ; even of those who can argue 
fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but 
it might be false for anything they know ; they have never 
thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think 
differently from them, and considered what such persons may 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 121 

have to say ; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense 
of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. 
They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify 
the remainder ; the considerations which show that a fact which 
seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that 
of two. apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought 
to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the 
scale and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, 
they are strangers to ; nor is it ever really known, but to those 
who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and 
endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. 
So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral 
and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths 
do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply 
them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil's 
advocate can conjure up. 

To abate the force of these considerations, an enemy of free 
discussion may be supposed to say that there is no necessity for 
mankind in general to know and understand all that can be said 
against or for their opinions by philosophers and theologians. 
That it is not needful for common men to be able to expose all 
the misstatements or fallacies of an ingenious opponent. That 
it is enough if there is always somebody capable of answering 
them, so that nothing likely to mislead uninstructed persons 
remains unrefuted. That simple minds, having been taught the 
obvious grounds of the truths inculcated on them, may trust to 
authority for the rest, and being aware that they have neither 
knowledge nor talent to resolve every dilhculty which can be 
raised, may repose in the assurance that all those which have 
been raised have been or can be answered, by those who are spe- 
cially trained to the task. 

Conceding to this view of the subject the utmost that can be 
claimed for it by those most easily satisfied with the amount of 
understanding of truth which ought to accompany the belief of 
it ; even so, the argument for free discussion is no way weakened. 
For even this doctrine acknowledges that mankind ought to have 



122 JOHN STUART MILL 

a rational assurance that all objections have been satisfactorily 
answered ; and how are they to be answered if that which re- 
quires to be answered is not spoken ? or how can the answer be 
known to be satisfactory if the objectors have no opportunity 
of showing that it is unsatisfactory ? If not the public, at least 
the philosophers and theologians who are to resolve the difficul- 
ties, must make themselves familiar with those difficulties in their 
most puzzling form ; and this cannot be accomplished unless 
they are freely stated and placed in the most advantageous light 
which they admit of. The Catholic Church has its own way of 
dealing with this embarrassing problem. It makes a broad 
separation between those who can be permitted to receive its 
doctrines on conviction and those who must accept .them on 
trust. Neither, indeed, are allowed any choice as to what they 
will accept ; but the clergy, such at least d,s can be fully confided 
in, may admissibly and meritoriously make themselves ac- 
quainted with the arguments of opponents, in order to answer 
them, and may, therefore, read heretical books ; the laity, not 
unless by special permission, hard to be obtained. This disci- 
pline recognizes knowledge of the enemy's case as beneficial to 
the teachers, but finds means, consistent with this, of denying 
it to the rest of the world; thus giving to the elite more mental 
culture, though not more mental freedom, than it allows to the 
mass. By this device it succeeds in obtaining the kind of mental 
superiority which its purposes require ; for though culture with- 
out freedom never made a large and liberal mind, it can make a 
clever nisi prius advocate of a cause. But in countries profess- 
ing Protestantism this resource is denied ; since Protestants 
hold, at least in theory, that the responsibility for the choice of 
a religion must be borne each for himself, and cannot be thrown 
off upon teachers. Besides, in the present state of the world, 
it is practically impossible that writings which are read by the 
instructed can be kept from the uninstructed. If the teachers 
of mankind are to be cognizant of all that they ought to know, 
everything must be free to be written and published without 
restraint. 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 123 

If, however, the mischievous operation of the absence of free 
discussion, when the received opinions are true, were confined 
to leaving men ignorant of the grounds of those opinions, it 
might be thought that this, if an intellectual is no moral evil, 
and does not affect the worth of the opinions, regarded in their 
influence on the character. The fact, however, is that not only 
the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discus- 
sion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself. The words 
which convey it cease to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small 
portion of those they were originally employed to communicate. 
Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain 
only a few phrases retained by rote ; or, if any part, the shell 
and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being 
lost. The great chapter in human history which this fact occu- 
pies and fills cannot be too earnestly studied and meditated on. 

It is illustrated in the experience of almost all ethical doctrines 
and religious creeds. They are all full of meaning and vitality 
to those who originate them, and to the direct disciples of the 
originators. Their meaning continues to be felt in undiminished 
strength, and is perhaps brought out into even fuller conscious- 
ness, so long as the struggle lasts to give the doctrine or creed 
an ascendancy over other creeds. At last it either prevails, and 
becomes the general opinion, or its progress stops ; it keeps pos- 
session of the ground it has gained, but ceases to spread further. 
When either of these results has become apparent, controversy 
on the subject flags, and gradually dies away. The doctrine has 
taken its place, if not as a received opinion, as one of the ad- 
mitted sects or divisions of opinion; those who hold it have 
generally inherited, not adopted it ; and conversion from one of 
these doctrines to another, being now an exceptional fact, occu- 
pies little place in the thoughts of their professors. Instead of 
being, as at first, constantly on the alert either to defend them- 
selves against the world, or to bring the world over to them, 
they have subsided into acquiescence, and neither listen, when 
they can help it, to arguments against their creed, nor trouble 
dissentients (if there be such) with arguments in its favor. 



124 JOHN STUART MILL 

From this time may usually be dated the decline in the living 
power of the doctrine. We often hear the teachers of all creeds 
lamenting the difficulty of keeping up in the minds of believers 
a lively apprehension of the truth which they nominally recog- 
nize, so that it may penetrate the feelings, and acquire a real 
mastery over the conduct. No such difficulty is complained of 
while the creed is still fighting for its existence; even the weaker 
combatants then know and feel what they are fighting for, and 
the difference between it and other doctrines ; in that period of 
every creed's existence, not a few persons may be found who 
have realized its fundamental principles in all the forms of 
thought, have weighed and considered them in all their important 
bearings, and have experienced the full effect on the character 
which belief in that creed ought to produce in a mind thoroughly 
imbued with it. But when it has come to be an hereditary creed, 
and to be received passively, not actively ; — when the mind is 
no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise 
its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, 
there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except 
the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if ac- 
cepting it on trust dispenses with the necessity of realizing it in 
consciousness, or testing it by personal experience; until it al- 
most ceases to connect itself at all with the inner life of the hu- 
man being. Then are seen the cases, so frequent in this age 
of the world as almost to form the majority, in which the creed 
remains, as it were, outside the mind, incrusting and petrifying 
it against all other influences addressed to the higher parts of 
our nature ; manifesting its power by not suffering any fresh and 
living conviction to get in, but itself doing nothing for the mind 
or heart, except standing sentinel over them to keep them 
vacant. 

To what an extent doctrines intrinsically fitted to make the 
deepest impression upon the mind may remain in it as dead 
beliefs, without being ever realized in the imagination, the feel- 
ings, or the understanding, is exemplified by the manner in 
which the majority of behevers hold the doctrines of Christianity. 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 125 

By Christianity I here mean what is accounted such by all 
churches and sects — the maxims and precepts contained in the 
New Testament. These are considered sacred, and accepted as 
laws, by all professing Christians. Yet it is scarcely too much 
to say that not one Christian in a thousand guides or tests his 
individual conduct by reference to those laws. The standard 
to which he does refer it is the custom of his nation, his class, 
or his reHgious profession. He has thus, on the one hand, a col- 
lection of ethical maxims, which he believes to have been vouch- 
safed to him by infallible wisdom as rules for his government ; 
and on the other, a set of everyday judgments and practices, 
which go a certain length with some of those maxims, not so 
great a length with others, stand in direct opposition to some, 
and are, on the whole, a compromise between the Christian 
creed and the interests and suggestions of worldly life. To the 
first of these standards he gives his homage ; to the other his 
real allegiance. All Christians believe that the blessed are the 
poor and humble, and those who are ill-used by the world ; that 
it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than 
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven ; that they should 
judge not, lest they should be judged ; that they should swear 
not at all ; that they should love their neighbor as themselves ; 
that if one take their cloak, they should give him their coat 
also ; that they should take no thought for the morrow ; that 
if they would be perfect, they should sell all that they have and 
give it to the poor. They are not insincere when they say that 
they believe these things. They do believe them, as people be- 
lieve what they have always heard lauded and never discussed. 
But in the sense of that living belief which regulates conduct, 
they believe these doctrines just up to the point to which it is 
usual to act upon them. The doctrines in their integrity are 
serviceable to pelt adversaries with ; and it is understood that 
they are to be put forward (when possible) as the reasons for 
whatever people do that they think laudable. But any one who 
reminded them that the maxims require an infinity of things 
which they never even think of doing, would gain nothing but to 



126 JOHN STUART MILL 

be classed among those very unpopular characters who affect 
to be better than other people. The doctrines have no hold on 
ordinary believers — are not a power in their minds. They have 
an habitual respect for the sound of them, but no feeling which 
spreads from the words to the things signified, and forces the mind 
to take them in, and make them conform to the formula. When- 
ever conduct is concerned, they look round for Mr. A and B to 
direct them how far to go in obeying Christ. 

Now we may be well assured that the case was not thus, but 
far otherwise, with the early Christians. Had it been thus, Chris- 
tianity never would have expanded from an obscure sect of the 
despised Hebrews into the religion of the Roman Empire. When 
their enemies said, "See how these Christians love one another" 
(a remark not likely to be made by anybody now), they assuredly 
had a much livelier feeling of the meaning of their creed than they 
have ever had since. And to this cause, probably, it is chiefly ow- 
ing that Christianity now makes so httle progress in extending its 
domain, and, after eighteen centuries, is still nearly confined to 
Europeans and the descendants of Europeans. Even with the 
strictly religious, who are much in earnest about their doctrines, 
and attach a greater amount of meaning to many of them than 
people in general, it commonly happens that the part which is 
thus comparatively active in their minds is that which was made 
by Calvin, or Knox, or some such person much nearer in character 
to themselves. The sayings of Christ coexist passively in their 
minds, producing hardly any effect beyond what is caused by 
mere listening to words too amiable and bland. There are many 
reasons, doubtless, why doctrines which are the badge of a sect re- 
tain more of their vitality than those common to all recognized 
sects, and why more pains are taken by teachers to keep their 
meaning alive ; but one reason certainly is, that the peculiar 
doctrines are more questioned, and have to be oftener defended 
against open gainsayers. Both teachers and learners go to sleep 
at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field. 

The same thing holds true, generally speaking, of all traditional 
doctrines — those of prudence and knowledge of life, as well as of 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 127 

morals or religion. All languages and literatures are full of gen- 
eral observations on life, both as to what it is, and how to conduct 
one's self in it; observations which everybody knows, which 
everybody repeats, or hears with acquiescence, which are received 
as truisms, yet of which most people first truly learn the meaning, 
when experience, generally of a painful kind, has made it a real- 
ity to them. How often, when smarting under some unforeseen 
misfortune or disappointment, does a person call to mind some 
proverb or common saying familiar to him all his life, the mean- 
ing of which, if he had ever before felt it as he does now, would 
have saved him from the calamity. There are, indeed, reasons 
for this other than the absence of discussion ; there are many 
truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until per- 
sonal experience has brought it home. But much more of the 
meaning even of these would have been understood, and what 
was understood would have been far more deeply impressed on 
the mind, if the man had been accustomed to hear it argued pro 
and con by people who did understand it. The fatal tendency of 
mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer 
doubtful is the cause of half their errors. A contemporary 
author has well spoken of "the deep slumber of a decided 
Ojpinion." 

J But what ! (it may be asked) Is the absence of unanimity an 
indispensable condition of true knowledge ? Is it necessary that 
some part of mankind should persist in error, to enable any to 
realize the truth? Does a belief cease to be real and vital as 
soon as it is generally received — and is a proposition never 
thoroughly understood and felt unless some doubt of it remains ? 
As soon as mankind have unanimously accepted a truth, does 
the truth perish within them ? The highest aim and best result 
of improved intelligence, it has hitherto been thought, is to unite 
mankind more and more in the acknowledgment of all important 
truths : and does the intelligence only last as long as it has not 
achieved its object ? Do the fruits of conquest perish by the 
very completeness of the victory ? 

I afi&rm no such thing. As mankind improve, the number 



128 JOHN STUART MILL 

of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be 
constantly on the increase : and the well-being of mankind may 
almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths 
which have reached the point of being uncontested. The cessa- 
tion, on one question after another, of serious controversy, is one 
of the necessary incidents of the consolidation of opinion ; a con- 
solidation as salutary in the case of true opinions, as it is dan- 
gerous and noxious when the opinions are erroneous. But 
though this gradual narrowing of the bounds of diversity of 
opinion is necessary in both senses of the term, being at once 
inevitable and indispensable, we are not therefore obliged to con- 
clude that all its consequences must be beneficial. The loss of 
so important an aid to the intelHgent and living apprehension 
of a truth as is afforded by the necessity of explaining it to, or 
defending it against, opponents, though not sufficient to out- 
weigh, is no trifling drawback from, the benefit of its universal 
recognition. Where this advantage can no longer be had, I con- 
fess I should Uke to see the teachers of mankind endeavoring to 
provide a substitute for it; some contrivance for making the 
difficulties of the question as present to the learner's conscious- 
ness as if they were pressed upon him by a dissentient champion, 
eager for his conversion. 

But instead of seeking contrivances for this purpose, they have 
lost those they formerly had. The Socratic dialectics, so mag- 
nificently exempKfied in the dialogues of Plato, were a contri- 
vance of this description. They were essentially a negative 
discussion of the great questions of philosophy and Ufe, directed 
with consummate skill to the purpose of convincing any one who 
had merely adopted the commonplaces of received opinion, that 
he did not understand the subject — that he as yet attached no 
definite meaning to the doctrines he professed ; in order that, 
becoming aware of his ignorance, he might be put in the way to 
attain a stable belief, resting on a clear apprehension both of the 
meaning of doctrines and of their evidence. The school disputa- 
tions of the Middle Ages had a somewhat similar object. They 
were intended to make sure that the pupil understood his own 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 129 

opinion and (by necessary correlation) the opinion opposed to it, 
and could enforce the grounds of the one and confute those of 
the other. These last-mentioned contests had, indeed, the incur- 
able defect that the premises appealed to were taken from au- 
thority, not from reason ; and, as a discipline to the mind, they 
were in every respect inferior to the powerful dialectics which 
formed the intellects of the " Socratici viri:" but the modern 
mind owes far more to both than it is generally willing to admit, 
and the present modes of education contain nothing which in 
the smallest degree supplies the place either of the one or of the 
other. A person who derives all his instruction from teachers 
or books, even if he escape the besetting temptation of content- 
ing himself with cram, is under no compulsion to hear both 
sides ; accordingly, it is far from a frequent accomplishment, 
even among thinkers, to know both sides ; and the weakest part of 
what everybody says in defense of his opinion is what he intends 
as a reply to antagonists. It is the fashion of the present time to 
disparage negative logic — that which points out weaknesses in 
theory or errors in practice without establishing positive truths. 
Such negative criticism would, indeed, be poor enough as an ulti- 
mate result ; but as a means to attaining any positive knowledge 
or conviction worthy the name, it cannot be valued too highly ; 
and until people are again systematically trained to it, there will 
be few great thinkers and a low general average of intellect, in 
any but the mathematical and physical departments of specula- 
tion. On any other subject no one's opinions deserve the name 
of knowledge, except so far as he has either had forced upon him 
by others, or gone through of himself, the same mental process 
which would have been required of him in carrying on an active 
controversy with opponents. That, therefore, which when ab- 
sent, it is so indispensable, but so difhcult, to create, how worse 
than absurd is it to forego, when spontaneously offering itself ! 
If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who 
will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, 
open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some 
one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard 



130 JOHN STUART MILL 

for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do 
with much greater labor for ourselves. 

It still remains to speak of one of the principal causes which 
make diversity of opinion advantageous, and will continue to do 
so until mankind shall have entered a stage of intellectual ad- 
vancement which at present seems at an incalculable distance. 
We have hitherto considered only two possibilities : that the 
received opinion may be false, and some other opinion, conse- 
quently, true ; or that, the received opinion being true, a con- 
flict with the opposite error is essential to a clear apprehension 
and deep f eehng of its truth. But there is a commoner case than 
either of these ; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being 
one true and the other false, share the truth between them ; and 
the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of 
the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part. 
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often 
true, but seldom or never the whole truth. They are a part of 
the truth ; sometimes a greater, sometimes a smaller part, but 
exaggerated, distorted, and disjoined from the truths by which 
they ought to be accompanied and limited. Heretical opinions, 
on the other hand, are generally some of these suppressed and 
neglected truths, bursting the bonds which kept them down, and 
either seeking reconciliation with the truth contained in the 
common opinion, or fronting it as enemies, and setting them- 
selves up, with similar exclusiveness, as the whole truth. The 
latter case is hitherto the more frequent, as, in the human mind, 
one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the 
exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of 
the truth usually sets while the other rises. Even progress, 
which ought to superadd, for the most part only substitutes one 
partial and incomplete truth for another ; improvement con- 
sisting chiefly in this, that the new fragment of truth is more 
wanted, more adapted to the needs of the time, than that which 
it displaces. Such being the partial character of prevailing 
opinions, even when resting on a true foundation, every opinion 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 131 

which embodies somewhat of the portion of truth which the 
common opinion omits, ought to be considered precious, with 
whatever amount of error and confusion that truth may be 
blended. No sober judge of human affairs will feel bound to be 
indignant because those who force on our notice truths which we 
should otherwise have overlooked, overlook some of those which 
we see. Rather, he will think that so long as popular truth is 
one-sided, it is more desirable than otherwise that unpopular truth 
should have one7sided asserters too ; such being usually the most 
energetic, and the most likely to compel reluctant attention to the 
fragment of wisdom which they proclaim as if it were the whole. 
Thus, in the eighteenth century, when nearly all the instructed, 
and all those of the uninstructed who were led by them, were lost 
in admiration of what is called civilization, and of the marvels of 
modern science, Uterature, and philosophy, and while greatly 
overrating the amount of unhkeness between the men of modern 
and those of ancient times, indulged the belief that the whole of 
the difference was in their own favor ; with what a salutary 
shock did the paradoxes of Rousseau explode like bombshells in 
the midst, dislocating the compact mass of one-sided opinion, and 
forcing its elements to recombine in a better form and with addi- 
tional ingredients. Not that the current opinions were on the 
whole farther from the truth than Rousseau's were ; on the con- 
trary, they were nearer to it ,' they contained more of positive 
truth, and very much less of error. Nevertheless, there lay in 
Rousseau's doctrine, and has floated down the stream of opinion 
along with it, a considerable amount of exactly those truths 
which the popular opinion wanted ; and these are the deposit 
which was left behind when the flood subsided. The superior 
worth of simplicity of Hfe, the enervating and demorahzing effect 
of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas 
which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds 
since Rousseau wrote ; and they will in time produce their due 
effect, though at present needing to be asserted as much as ever, 
and to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have 
nearly exhausted their power. 



132 JOHN STUART MILL 

In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of 
order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both nec- 
essary elements of a healthy state of political life ; until the one or 
the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party 
equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing 
what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away. 
Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the defi- 
ciencies of the other ; but it is in a great measure the opposition of 
the other that keeps each within the Umits of reason and sanity. 
Unless opinions favorable to democracy and to aristocracy, to 
property and to equality, to cooperation and to competition, to 
luxury and to abstinence, to sociality and individuality, to liberty 
and discipline, and all the other standing antagonisms of practi- 
cal fife, are expressed with equal freedom, and enforced and de- 
fended with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both 
elements obtaining their due ; one scale is sure to go up, and the 
other down. Truth, in the great practical concerns of Ufe, is so 
much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, 
that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to 
make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it 
has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between com- 
batants fighting under hostile banners. On any of the great 
open questions just enumerated, if either of the two opinions has 
a better claim than the other, not merely to be tolerated, but to 
be encouraged and countenanced, it is the one which happens at 
the particular time and place to be in a minority. That is the 
opinion which, for the time being, represents the neglected in- 
terests, the side of human weU-being which is in danger of obtain- 
ing less than its share. I am aware that there is not, in this 
country, any intolerance of differences of opinion on most of these 
topics. They are adduced to show, by admitted and multipUed 
examples, the universality of the fact, that only through diver- 
sity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, 
a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth. When there are 
persons to be found who form an exception to the apparent 
unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 133 

right, it is always probable that dissentients have something 
worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose 
something by their silence. 

It maybe objected, "But some received principles, especially 
on the highest and most vital subjects, are more than half-truths. 
The Christian morality, for instance, is the whole truth on that 
subject, and if any one teaches a morahty which varies from it, 
he is wholly in error." As.this is of all cases the most important 
in practice, none can be fitter to test the general maxim. But be- 
fore pronouncing what Christian morality is or is not, it would be 
desirable to decide what is meant by Christian morality. If it 
means the morab'ty of the New Testament, I wonder that any 
one who derives his knowledge of this from the book itself, can 
suppose that it was announced or intended, as a complete 
doctrine of morals. The Gospel always refers to a preexisting 
morality, and confines its precepts to the particulars in which 
that morality was to be corrected, or superseded by a wide;r and 
higher ; expressing itself, moreover, in terms most general, often 
impossible to be interpreted Hterally, and possessing rather the 
impressiveness of poetry or eloquence than the precision of 
legislation. To extract from it a body of ethical doctrine has 
never been possible without eking it out from the Old Testament, 
that is, from a system elaborate indeed, but in many respects 
barbarous, and intended only for a barbarous people. St. 
Paul, a declared enemy to this Judaical mode of interpret- 
ing the doctrine and filling up the scheme of his Master, 
equally assumes a preexisting morality, namely, that of the 
Greeks and Romans ; and his advice to Christians is in a 
great measure a system of accommodation to that ; even to the 
extent of giving an apparent sanction to slavery. What is called 
Christian, but should rather be termed theological, morality, was 
not the work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of much later origin, 
having been gradually built up by the Catholic Church of the 
first five centuries, and though not implicitly adopted by moderns 
and Protestants, has been much less modified by them than might 
have been expected. For the most part, indeed, they have con- 



134 JOHN STUART MILL 

tented themselves with cutting off the additions which had been 
made to it in the Middle Ages, each sect supplying the place by 
fresh additions, adapted to its own character and tendencies. 
That mankind owe a great debt to this moraUty, and to its early 
teachers, I should be the last person to deny ; but I do not scruple 
to say of it, that it is, in many important points, incomplete and 
one-sided, and that unless ideas and f eeUngs, not sanctioned by it, 
had contributed to the formation of European life and character, 
human affairs would have been in a worse condition than they 
now are. Christian morahty (so called) has all the characters of 
a reaction ; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its 
ideal is negative rather than positive ; passive rather than active ; 
Innocence rather than Nobleness ; Alastinence from Evil, rather 
than energetic Pursuit of Good : in its precepts (as has been well 
said) " thou shalt not " predominates unduly over " thou shalt." 
In its horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which 
has been gradually compromised away into one of legality. It 
holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the ap- 
pointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous Ufe : in this falling 
far below the best of the ancients, and doing what Ues in it to 
give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by dis- 
connecting each man's feelings of duty from the interests of his 
fellow-creatures, except so far as a self-interested inducement is 
offered to him for consulting them. It is essentially a doctrine 
of passive obedience ; it inculcates submission to all authorities 
found established; who indeed are not to be actively obeyed 
when they command what religion forbids, but who are not to be 
resisted, far less rebelled against, for any amount of wrong to 
ourselves. And while, in the morality of the best Pagan nations, 
duty to the state holds even a disproportionate place, infringing 
on the just liberty of the individual ; in purely Christian ethics, 
that grand department of duty is scarcely noticed or acknowl- 
edged. It is in the Koran, not the New Testament, that we 
read the maxim — :" A ruler who appoints any man to an office, 
when there is in his dominions another man better qualified for 
it, sins against God and against the State." What little recogni- 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 135 

tion the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern moral- 
ity, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Chris- 
tian ; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of 
magnanimity, highmindedness, personal dignity, even the sense 
of honor, is derived from the purely human, not the religious 
part of our education, and never could have grown out of a 
standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, 
is that of obedience. 

I am as far as any one from pretending that these defects are 
necessarily inherent in the Christian ethics, in every manner in 
which it can be conceived, or that the many requisites of a 
complete moral doctrine which it does not contain, do not admit 
of being reconciled with it. Far less would I insinuate this of the 
doctrines and precepts of Christ himself. I believe that the 
sayings of Christ are all that I can see any evidence of their 
having been intended to be; that they are irreconcilable with 
nothing which a comprehensive morality reqviires ; that every- 
thing which is excellent in ethics may be brought within them, 
with no greater violence to their language than has been done to 
it by all who have attempted to deduce from them any practical 
system of conduct whatever. But it is quite consistent with 
this to believe that they contain, and were meant to contain, 
only a part of the truth ; that many essential elements of the 
highest morality are among the things which are not provided 
for, nor intended to be provided for, in the recorded deliverances 
of the Founder of Christianity, and which have been entirely 
thrown aside in the system of ethics erected on the basis of those 
deliverances by the Christian Church, And this being so, I think 
it a great error to persist in attempting to find in the Christian 
doctrine that complete rule for our guidance, which its author 
intended it to sanction and enforce, but only partially to provide. 
I believe, too, that this narrow theory is becoming a grave prac- 
tical evil, detracting greatly from the value of the moral training 
and instruction, which so many well-meaning persons are now 
at length exerting themselves to promote. I much fear that by 
attempting to form the mind and feelings on an exclusively re- 



136 JOHN STUART MILL 

ligious type, and discarding those secular standards (as for 
want of a better name they may be called) which heretofore 
coexisted with and supplemented the Christian ethics, receiving 
some of its spirit, and infusing into it some of theirs, there will 
result, and is even now resulting, a low, abject, servile type of 
character, which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the 
Supreme Will, is incapable of rising to or sympathizing in the 
conception of Supreme Goodness. I believe that other ethics 
than any which can be evolved from exclusively Christian 
sources, must exist side by side with Christian ethics to produce 
the moral regeneration of mankind ; and that the Christian sys- 
tem is no exception to the rule, that in an imperfect state of the 
human mind, the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions. 
It is not necessary that in ceasing to ignore the moral truths not 
contained in Christianity, men should ignore any of those which 
it does contain. Such prejudice, or oversight, when it occurs, is 
altogether an evil ; but it is one from which we cannot hope to 
be always exempt, and must be regarded as the price paid for 
an inestimable good. The exclusive pretension made by a part 
of the truth to be the whole, must and ought to be protested 
against, and if a reactionary imptdse should make the protestors 
unjust in their turn, this one-sidedness, like the other, may be 
lamented, but must be tolerated. If Christians would teach in- 
fidels to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just 
to infidelity. It can do truth no service to blink the fact, known 
to all who have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary 
history, that a large portion of the noblest and most valuable 
moral teaching has been the work, not only of men who did not 
know, but of men who knew and rejected, the Christian faith. 

I do not pretend that the most unlimited use of the freedom of 
enunciating all possible opinions would put an end to the evils of 
religious or philosophical sectarianism. Every truth which men 
of narrow capacity are in earnest about, is sure to be asserted, 
inculcated, and in many ways even acted on, as if no other truth 
existed in the w^orld, or at all events none that could limit or 
qualify the first. I acknowledge that the tendency of all opin- 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 137 

ions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, 
but is often heightened and exacerbated thereby ; the truth 
which ought to have been, but was not, seen, being rejected all 
the more violently because proclaimed by persons regarded as 
opponents. But it is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on 
the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision 
of opinion works its salutary effect. Not the violent confhct be- 
tween parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, 
is the formidable evil : there is always hope when people are 
forced to listen to both sides ; it is when they attend only to one 
that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have 
the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood. And 
since there are few mental attributes more rare than that ju- 
dicial faculty which can sit in intelligent judgment between 
two sides of a question, of which only one is represented by an 
advocate before it, truth has no chance but in proportion as 
every side of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of 
the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated as to be 
listened to. 

We have now recognized the necessity to the mental well-being 
of mankind (on which all their other well-being depends) of free- 
dom of opinion, and freedom of the expression of opinion, on 
four distinct grounds ; which we will now briefly recapitulate. 

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, 
for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to as- 
sume our own infallibility. 

Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, 
and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth ; and since 
the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or 
never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opin- 
ions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being 
supplied. 

Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the 
whole truth ; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously 
and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it. 



138 JOHN STUART MILL 

be held in the manner of a prejudice, with httle comprehension 
or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, 
fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of 
being lost or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the 
character and conduct : the dogma becoming a mere formal 
profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and 
preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, 
from reason or personal experience. 

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to 
take some notice of those who say that the free expression of 
all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner 
be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. 
Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these 
supposed bounds are to be placed ; for if the test be offense to 
those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that 
this offense is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, 
and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they 
find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong 
feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent. But this, 
though an important consideration in a practical point of view, 
merges in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the 
manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, 
may be very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. 
But the principal offenses of the kind are such as it is mostly im- 
possible, unless by accidental self -betrayal, to bring home to 
conviction. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to 
suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the 
case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all this, even to 
the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect 
good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many other 
respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompe- 
tent, that it is rarely possible on adequate grounds conscien- 
tiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable; 
and still less could law presume to interfere with this kind of 
controversial misconduct. With regard to what is commonly 
meant by intemperate discussion, namely, invective, sarcasm, 



LIBERTY OF THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION 139 

personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons 
would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to inter- 
dict them equally to both sides ; but it is only desired to restrain 
the employment of them against the prevailing opinion : against 
the unprevailing they may not only be used without general dis- 
approval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the 
praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever 
mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed 
against the comparatively defenseless ; and whatever unfair 
advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of 
asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions. 
The worst offense of this kind which can be committed by a 
polemic, is to stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as 
bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who 
hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because 
they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but them- 
selves feels much interest in seeing justice done them ; but this 
weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack 
a prevailing opinion : they can neither use it with safety to 
themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on 
their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those com- 
monly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation 
of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary 
offense, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight 
degree without losing ground : while unmeasured vituperation 
employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter 
people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to 
those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth 
and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment 
of vituperative language than the other ; and, for example, if it 
were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to 
discourage offensive attacks on infidelity than on religion. It is, 
however, obvious that law and authority have no business with 
restraining either, while opinion ought, in every instance, to 
determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case ; 
condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he 



I40 JOHN STUART MILL 

places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of can- 
dor, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest 
themselves ; but not inferring these vices from the side which a 
person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our 
own : and giving merited honor to every one, whatever opin- 
ion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state 
what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating 
nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or 
can be supposed to tell, in their favor. This is the real moral- 
ity of public discussion ; and if often violated, I am happy to 
think that there are many controversialists who to a great extent 
observe it, and a still greater number who conscientiously strive 
towards it. 



VI 

OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 
John Morley 

[Viscount Morley (1838-) was in the early years of his public life editor 
of the Fortnightly Rcvino, resigning to enter Parliament in 1883. As a poli- 
tician he was a strong supporter of Gladstone's policies, and a member of 
his "Home Rule Cabinet." In the domain of literary study, which has 
been for him a serious occupation throughout his long parliamentary career, 
he has shown a penetrating acquaintance with the political and intellectual 
movements of the eighteenth century in studies of Burke, Rousseau, Voltaire, 
and Diderot. His interest in the history of Enghsh political reforms is seen 
in his hfe of Cobden and in his monumental biography of Gladstone. 

Of the Possible Utility of Error constitutes the second chapter of the author's 
work On Compromise, published in 1874, a cogent and timely discussion, in 
a period of great spiritual and political uncertainty, of one of the dominant 
principles of social organization. This chapter is an assertion of the moral 
weakness, and even the futility in practice, of the plea of expediency which 
holds it possible to maintain a code of moral principles varied to suit different 
grades of inteUigence and education. The original importance of this chapter 
may have lessened since the period when the growth of scientific skepticism 
seemed to churchmen to threaten the moral restraints inherent in religious 
faith; but even with our modern recognition of the positive influence of 
scientific truth upon moral point of view, the essay serves as a useful 
criticism of an attitude of mind that has by no means disappeared.] 

Das Wahre forderi; aus dent Irrthum entwickelt sich nichts, er 
verwickelt uns nur} — Goethe. 

At the outset of an inquiry how far existing facts ought to be 
allowed to overrule ideas and principles that are at variance with 
them, a preliminary question lies in our way, about which it may 
be well to say something. This is the question of a dual doc- 

1 The truth helps us ; nothing comes of error : it simply entangles us. 
— Editors. 

141 



142 JOHN MORLEY 

trine. In plainer words, the question whether it is expedient 
that the more enlightened classes in a community should upon 
system not only possess their Hght in silence, but whether they 
should openly encourage a doctrine for the less enlightened classes 
which they do not believe to be true for themselves, while they 
regard it as indispensably useful in the case of less fortunate 
people. An eminent teacher tells us how after he had once 
succeeded in presenting the principle of Necessity to his own mind 
in a shape which seemed to bring with it all the advantages of 
the principle of Free Will, " he no longer suffered under the bur- 
den so heavy to one who aims at being a reformer in opinions, of 
thinking one doctrine true, and the contrary doctrine morally 
beneficial." ^ The discrepancy which thiswTiter thought a heavy 
burden has struck others as the basis of a satisfactory solution. 

Nil dulcius est bene quam munita tenere 
Edita doctrina sapientum templa serena, 
Despicere undo queas alios passimque videre 
Errare atque viam palantes quaerere vitse.^ 

The learned are to hold the true doctrine; the unlearned are 
to be taught its morally beneficial contrary. " Let the Church," 
it has been said, " admit two descriptions of believers, those who 
are for the letter, and those who hold by the spirit. At a cer- 
tain point in rational culture, belief in the supernatural becomes 
for many an impossibility ; do not force such persons to wear a 
cowl of lead. Do not you meddle with what we teach or write, 
and then we will not dispute the common people with you ; do 
not contest our place in the school and the academy, and then we 
will surrender to your hands the country school." ^ This is only 
a very courageous and definite way of saying what a great many 
less accomplished persons than M. Renan have silently in their 

1 Mill's Autobiography, p. 170. 

2 Nothing is sweeter than to dwell in the temples secured and established 
by the calm teachings of the wise, whence you may look down upon others 
wandering hither and thither and straggling about in search of the path of 
life. — Editors. 

^ M. Renan's Reforme Intelleckielleei Morale de la France, p. 98. 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 143 

hearts, and in England quite as extensively as in France. They 
do not believe in hell, for instance, but they think hell a useful 
fiction for the lower classes. They would deeply regret any change 
in the spirit or the machinery of public instruction which would 
release the lower classes from so wholesome an error. And as 
with hell, so with other articles of the supernatural system ; the 
existence of a Being who will distribute rewards and penalties 
in a future state, the permanent sentience of each human person- 
ality, the vigilant supervision of our conduct, as well as our in- 
most thoughts and desires, by the heavenly powers ; and so 
forth. 

Let us discuss this matter impersonally, without reference to 
our own opinions and without reference to the evidence for 
or against their truth. I am not speaking now of those who 
hold all these ideas to be certainly true, or highly probable, and 
who at the same time incidentally insist on the great usefulness of 
such ideas in confirming morality and producing virtuous types 
of character. With such persons, of course, there is no question 
of a dual doctrine. They entertain certain convictions themselves 
and naturally desire to have their influence extended over others. 
The proposition which we have to consider is of another kind. 
It expresses the notions of those who — to take the most impor- 
tant kind of illustration — think untrue the popular ideas of su- 
pernatural interference in our obscure human affairs ; who think 
untrue the notion of the prolongation of our existence after 
death to fulfill the purpose of the supernatural powers ; or at 
least who think them so extremely improbable that no reasonable 
man or woman, once awakened to a conviction of this improba- 
bility, would thenceforth be capable of receiving effective check 
or guidance from beliefs, that would have sunk slowly down to 
the level of doubtful guesses. We have now to deal with those 
who, while taking this view of certain doctrines, still declare them 
to be indispensable for restraining from antisocial conduct all 
who are not acute or instructed enough to see through them. 
In other words, they think error useful, and that it may be the 
best thing for society that masses of men should cheat and de- 



144 JOHN MORLEY 

ceive themselves in their most fervent aspirations and their 
deepest assurances. This is the furthest extreme to which the 
empire of existing facts over principles can well be imagined to 
go. It lies at the root of every discussion upon the limits which 
separate lawful compromise or accommodation from palpable 
hypocrisy. 

It will probably be said that according to the theory of the 
school of which M. Renan is the most eloquent representative, 
the common people are not really cheating themselves or being 
cheated. Indeed M. Renan himself has expatiated on the charm 
of seeing figures of the ideal in the cottages of the poor, images 
representing no reality, and so forth. " What a delight," he 
cries, " for the man who is borne down by six days of toil to come 
on the seventh to rest upon his knees, to contemplate the tall 
columns, a vault, arches, an altar ; to listen to the chanting, to 
hear moral and consoling words ! " ^ The dogmas which criti- 
cism attacks are not for these poor people " the object of an 
explicit affirmation," and therefore there is no harm in them ; "it 
is the privilege of pure sentiment to be invulnerable, and to play 
with poison without being hurt by it." In other words, the dog- 
mas are false, but the liturgy, as a performance stirring the senses 
of awe, reverence, susceptibility to beauty of various kinds, ap- 
peals to and satisfies a sentiment that is both true and indis- 
pensable in the human mind. More than this, in the two or 
three supreme moments of life to which men look forward and 
on which they look back, — at birth, at the passing of the thresh- 
old into fullness of life, at marriage, at death, — the Church is 
present to invest the hour with a certain solemn and dignified 
charm. That is the way in which the instructed are to look at 
the services of a Church, after they have themselves ceased to 
believe its faith, as a true account of various matters which it 
professes to account for truly. 

It will be perceived that this is not exactly the ground of those 
who think a number of what they confess to be untruths, whole- 
some for the common people for reasons of police, and who would 
^ Eludes d'Histoire Religieuse, Preface, p. xvi. 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 145 

maintain churches on the same principle on which they maintain 
the county constabulary. It is a psychological, not a political 
ground. It is on the whole a more true, as well as a far more 
exalted, position. The human soul, they say, has these lovely 
and elevating aspirations ; not to satisfy them is to leave man a 
dwarfed creature. Why quarrel with a system that leaves you to 
satisfy them in the true way, and does much to satisfy them in a 
false but not very harmful way among those who unfortunately 
have to sit in the darkness of the outer court ? 

This is not a proper occasion for saying anything about the 
adequateness of the Catholic, or any other special manner of fos- &j 
tering and solacing the religious impulses of men. We have to 
assume that the instructed class believe the Catholic dogmas 
to be untrue, and yet wish the uninstructed to be handed over 
to a system that reposes on the theory that these dogmas are 
superlatively true. What then is to be said of the tenableness 
of such a position ? To the plain man it looks like a deliberate 
connivance at a plan for the propagation of error — assuming, 
as I say, for the moment, that these articles of belief are errone- 
ous and contrary to fact and evidence. Ah, but, we are told, 
the people make no explicit affirmation of dogma ; that does 
nothing for them ; they are indifferent to it. A great variety of 
things might be said to this statement. We might ask, for in- 
stance, whether the people ever made an explicit affirmation of 
dogma in the past, or whether it was always the hazy indifferent 
matter which it is supposed to be now. If so, whether we shall 
not have to recast our most fundamental notions of the way in 
which Christian civilization has been evolved. If not, and if peo- 
ple did once explicitly affirm dogma, when exactly was it that 
they ceased to do so ? 

The answers to these questions would all go to show that at 
the time when religion was the great controlling and organizing 
force in conduct, the prime elemental dogmas were accepted with 
the most vivid conviction of reality. I do not pretend that the 
common people followed all the inferences which the intellectual 
subtlety of the master spirits of theology drew so industriously 



146 JOHN MORLEY 

from the simple premises of scripture and tradition. But assur- 
edly dogma was at the foundation of the whole structure. When 
did it cease to be so ? How was the structure supported, after 
you had altered this condition of things ? 

Apart from this historic issue, the main question one would 
like to put to the upholder of duality of religion on this plea, is 
the simple one, whether the power of the ceremonial which charms 
him so much is not actually at this moment drawn wholly from 
dogma and the tradition of dogma; whether its truth is not 
explicitly affirmed to the unlettered man, and whether the insep- 
arable connection between the dogma and the ceremonial is not 
constantly impressed upon him by the spiritual teachers to whom 
the dual system hands him and his order over for all time ? If 
any one of these philosophic critics will take the trouble to listen 
to a few courses of sermons at the present day, and the remark 
appHes not less to Protestant than to Catholic churches, he will 
find that instead of that ' ' parole morale et consolante " ^ which is so 
soothing to think of, the pulpit is now the home of fervid con- 
troversy and often exacerbated declamation in favor of ancient 
dogma against modern science. We do not say whether this is 
or is not the wisest line for the clergy to follow. We only press 
the fact against those who wish us to believe that dogma counts 
for nothing in the popular faith, and that therefore we need not 
be uneasy as to its effects. 

Next, one would say to those who think that all will go well if 
you divide the community into two classes, one privileged to 
use its own mind, the other privileged to have its mind used by a 
priesthood, that they overlook the momentous circumstance of 
these professional upholders of dogmatic systems being also pos- 
sessed of a vast social influence in questions that naturally belong 
to another sphere. There is hardly a single great controversy in 
modern politics where the statesman does not find himself in 
immediate contact with the real or supposed interests, and with 
the active or passive sentiment, of one of these religious systems. 
Therefore if the instructed or intellectually privileged class cheer- 
^ Moral and comforting word, — Editors. 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 147 

fully leave the field open to men who, ex hypothesi,^ are presumed 
to be less instructed, narrower, more impenetrable by reason, and 
the partisans of the letter against the spirit, then this result fol- 
lows. They are deliberately strengthening the hands of the per- 
sons least fitted by judgment, experience, and temper for using 
such power rightly. And they are strengthening them not 
merely in dealing with religious matters, but, what is of more 
importance, in dealing with an endless variety of the gravest 
social and political matters. It is impossible to map out the exact 
dimensions of the field in which a man shall exercise his influence, 
and to which he is to be rigorously confined. Give men influence 
in one matter, especially if that be such a matter as religious be- 
lief and ceremonial, and it is simply impossible that this influ- 
ence shall not extend with more or less effect over as much of 
the whole sphere of conduct as they may choose to claim. This 
is no discredit to them ; on the contrary it is to their honor. So, 
in short, in surrendering the common people without dispute or 
effort to organized priesthoods for religious purposes, you would 
be inevitably including a vast number of other purposes in the 
selfsame destination. This does not in the least prejudice 
practical ways of dealing with certain existing circumstances, 
such as the propriety or justice of allowing a Catholic people to 
have a Catholic university. It is only an argument against erect- 
ing into a complete and definite formula the division of a society 
into two great castes, the one with a religion of the spirit, the 
other with a creed of the letter. 

Again, supposing that the enlightened caste were to consent to 
abandon the common people to what are assumed to be lower and 
narrower forms of truth, — which is after all little more than a 
fine phrase for forms of falsehood, — what can be more futile 
than to suppose that such a compromise will be listened to for a 
single moment by a caste whose first principle is that they are the 
possessors and ministers, not of an inferior or superior form of 
truth, but of the very truth itself, absolute, final, complete, 
divinely sent, infallibly interpreted ? The disciples of the rela- 
^ From our assumption. — Editors. 



148 JOHN MORLEY 

tive may afford to compromise. The disciples of the absolute, 
never. 

We shall see other objections, as we go on, to this state of things, 
in which a minority holds true opinions and abandons the ma- 
jority to false ones. At the bottom of the advocacy of a dual 
doctrine sluipbers the idea that there is no harm in men being 
mistaken, or at least only so little harm as is more than com- 
pensated for by the marked tranquillity in which their mistake 
may wrap them. This is not an idea merely that intellectual 
error is a pathological necessity of the mind, no more to be 
escaped than the pathological necessities which afflict and finally 
dissolve the body. That is historically true. It is an idea that 
error somehow in certain stages, where there is enough of it, 
actually does good, like vaccination. Well, the thesis of the 
present chapter is that erroneous opinion of belief, in itself and as 
such, can never be useful. This may seem a truism which every- 
body is willing to accept without demur. But it is one of those 
truisms which persons habitually forget and repudiate in practice, 
just because they have never made it real to themselves by consid- 
ering and answering the objections that may be brought against 
it. We see this repudiation before our eyes every day. Thiis, for 
instance, parents theoretically take it for granted that error can- 
not be useful, while they are teaching or allowing others to teach 
their children what they, the parents, believe to be untrue. Thus 
husbands who think the common theology baseless and un- 
meaning, are found to prefer that their wives shall not question 
this theology nor neglect its rites. These are only two out of a 
hundred examples of the daily admission that error may be very 
useful to other people. I need hardly say that to deny this, as 
the commonplace to which this chapter is devoted denies it, is a 
different thing from denying the expediency of letting errors 
alone at a given time. That is another question, to be discussed 
afterwards. You may have a thoroughly vicious and dangerous 
enemy, and yet it may be expedient to choose your own hour and 
occasion for attacking him. " The passage from error to truth," 
in the words of Condorcet, ' ' may be accompanied by certain evils. 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 149 

Every great change necessarily brings some of these in its train ; 
and though they may be always far below the evil you are for 
destroying, yet it ought to do what is possible to diminish them. 
It is not enough to do good ; one must do it in a good way. No 
doubt we should destroy all errors, but as it is impossible to de- 
stroy them all in an instant, we should imitate a prudent archi- 
tect who, when obliged to destroy a building, and knowing how 
its parts are united together, sets about its demolition in such a 
way as to prevent its fall from being dangerous." 

Those, let us note by the way, who are accustomed to think the / / 
moral tone of the eighteenth century low and gross compared 
with that of the nineteenth, may usefully contrast these just and 
prudent words of caution in extirpating error, with M. Renan's 
invitation to men whom he considers wrong in their interpreta- 
tion of religion, to plant their error as widely and deeply as they 
can ; and who are moreover themselves supposed to be de- 
moralized, or else they would not be likely to acquiesce in a 
previous surrender of the universities to men whom they think 
in mortal error. Apart, however, from M. Renan, Condorcet's 
words merely assert the duty of setting to work to help on the 
change from false to true opinions with prudence, and this every 
sensible man admits. Our position is that in estimating the 
situation, in counting up and balancing the expediencies of an 
attack upon error at this or that point, nothing is to be set to the 
credit of error as such, nor is there anything in its own operations 
or effects to entitle it to a moment's respite. Every one would 
admit this at once in the case of physical truths, though there 
are those who say that some of the time spent in the investiga- 
tion of physical truths might be more advantageously devoted to 
social problems. But in the case of moral and religious truths 
or errors, people, if they admit that nothing is to be set to the 
credit of error as such, still constantly have a subtle and practi- 
cally mischievous confusion in their minds between the possible 
usefulness of error, and the possible expediency of leaving it tem- 
porarily undisturbed. What happens in consequence of such a 
confusion is this. Men leave error undisturbed, because they 



I50 JOHN MORLEY 

accept in a loose way the proposition that a behef may be "mor- 
ally useful without being intellectually sustainable." They dis- 
guise their own dissent from popular opinions, because they re- 
gard such opinions as useful to other people. We are not now 
discussing the case of those who embrace a creed for themselves, 
on the ground that, though they cannot demonstrate its truth to 
the understanding, yet they find it pregnant with moralizing and 
elevating characteristics. We are thinking of a very different 
attitude — that, namely, of persons who believe a creed to be not 
more morally useful than it is intellectually sustainable, so far as 
they themselves are concerned. To them it is pure and un- 
compensated error. Yet from a vague and general idea that 
what is useless error to them may be useful to others, they 
insist on doing their best to perpetuate the system which 
spreads and consecrates the error. And how do they settle the 
question ? They reckon up the advantages, and forget the 
drawbacks. They detect and dwell on one or two elements 
of utility in the false belief or the worn-out institution, and 
leave out of all account the elements that make in the other 
direction. 

Considering how much influence this vague persuasion has 
in encouraging a well-meaning hypocrisy in individuals, and a 
profound stagnation in societies, it may be well to examine the 
matter somewhat generally. Let us try to measure the force of 
some of the most usual pleas for error. 

I. A false opinion, it may be said, is frequently found to have 
clustering around it a multitude of excellent associations, which 
do far more good than the false opinion that supports them does 
harm. In the Middle Ages, for instance, there was a beUef that a 
holy man had the gift of routing demons, of healing the sick, and 
of working divers other miracles. Supposing that this belief was 
untrue, supposing that it was an error to attribute the sudden 
death of an incredible multitude of troublesome flies in a church 
to the fact of Saint Bernard having excommunicated them, what 
then ? The mistaken opinion was still associated with a deep 
reverence for virtue and sanctity, and this was more valuable 






OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 



151 



than the error of the explanation of the death of the flies was 
noxious or degrading. 

The answer to this seems to be as follows. First, in making 
false notions the proofs or close associates of true ones, you are 
exposing the latter to the ruin which awaits the former. For ex- 
ample, if you have in the minds of children or servants associated 
honesty, industry, truthfulness, with the fear of hell-fire, then 
supposing this fear to become extinct in their minds, — which, 
being unfounded in truth, it is in constant risk of doing, — the 
virtues associated with it are likely to be weakened exactly in 
proportion as that association was strong. 

Second, for all good habits in thought or conduct there are good 
and real reasons in the nature of things. To leave such habits 
attached to false opinions is to lessen the weight of these natural 
or spontaneous reasons, and so to do more harm in the long run 
than effacement of them seems for a time to do good. Most 
excellencies in human character have a spontaneous root in our 
nature. Moreover if they had not, and where they have not, 
there is always a vahd and real external defense for them. The 
unreal defense must be weaker than the real one, and the substi- 
tution of a weak for a strong defense, where both are to be had, is 
not useful, but the very opposite. 

II. It is true, the objector would probably continue, that there 
is a rational defense for all excellencies of conduct, as there is for 
all that is worthy and fitting in institutions. But the force of a 
rational defense lies in the rationality of the man to whom it 
is proffered. The arguments which persuade one trained in 
scientific habits of thought, only touch persons of the same kind. 
Character is not all pure reason. That fitness of things which 
you pronounce to be the foundation of good habits, may be borne 
in upon men, and may speak to them, through other channels 
than the syllogism. You assume a community of highly trained 
wranglers and proficient sophisters. The plain fact is that, 
for the mass of men, use and wont, rude or gracious symbols, 
blind custom, prejudices, superstitions, — however erroneous in 
themselves, however inadequate to the conveyance of the best 



152 JOHN MORLEY 

truth, — are the only safe guardians of the common virtues. In 
this sense, then, error may have its usefulness. 

A hundred years ago this apology for error was met by those 
high-minded and interesting men, the French believers in human 
perfectibiHty, with their characteristic dogma, — of which Rous- 
seau was the ardent expounder, — that man is born with a clear 
and unsophisticated spirit, perfectly able to discern all the simple 
truths necessary for common conduct by its own imaided light. 
His motives are all pure and unselfish and his intelligence is un- 
clouded, until priests and tyrants mutilate the one and corrupt 
the other. We who have the benefit of the historic method, and 
have to take into accoimt the medium that surroxmds a human 
creature the moment it comes into the world, to say nothing of all 
the inheritance from the past which it brings within it into the 
world at the same moment, cannot take up this ground. We 
cannot maintain that everj^body is born with Hght enough to see 
the rational defenses of things for himself, without the educa- 
tion of institutions. What we do maintain is — and this is the 
answer to the plea for error at present under consideration — that 
whatever impairs the brightness of such light as a man has, is not 
useful but hurtful. Our reply to those who contend for the use- 
fulness of error on the ground of the comparative impotence of 
rationality over ordinary minds, is something of this kind. Super- 
stition, blind obedience to custom, and the other substitutes for 
a right and independent use of the mind, may accidentally and 
in some few respects impress good ideas upon persons who are too 
darkened to accept these ideas on their real merits. But then 
superstition itself is the main cause of this very darkness. To 
hold error is in so far to foster erroneous ways of thinking on all 
subjects ; is to make the intelligence less and less ready to receive 
truth in all matters whatever. Men are made incapable of per- 
cei\ing the rational defenses, and of feehng rational motives, for 
good habits, — so far as they are thus incapable, — by the very 
errors which we are asked silently to countenance as useful 
substitutes for right reason. " Erroneous motives," as Condorcet 
has expressed this matter, " have an additional drawback at- 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 153 

tached to them, the habit which they strengthen of reasoning ill. 
The more important the subject on which you reason ill, and the 
more you busy yourself about it, by so much the more dangerous 
do the influences of such a habit become. It is especially on 
subjects analogous to that on which you reason wrongly, or which 
you connect \sith it by habit, that such a defect extends most 
powerfully and most rapidly. Hence it is extremely hard for the 
man who believes himself obliged to conform in his conduct to 
what he considers truths useful to men, but who attributes the 
obligation to erroneous motives, to reason very correctly on the 
truths themselves ; the more attention he pays to such motives, 
and the more importance he comes to attach to them, the more 
likely he will be to go wrong." ^ So, in short, superstition does an 
immense harm by enfeebling rational ways of thinking ; it does a 
little good by accidentally indorsing rational conclusions in one or 
two matters. And yet, though the evil which it is said to repair 
is a trifle beside the e\'il which it is admitted to inflict, the balance 
of expediencies is after all declared to be such as to warrant us in 
calling errors useful ! 

III. A third objection now presents itself to me, which I wish to 
state as strongly as possible. ' ' Even if a false opinion cannot in it- 
self be more useful than a true one, whatever good habits may 
seem to be connected with it, yet," it may be contended, " rela- 
tively to the general mental attitude of a set of men, to their 
other notions and maxims, the false opinion may entail less harm 
than would be wrought by its mere demolition. There are false 
opinions so intimately bound up with the whole way of 
thinking and feeling, that to introduce one or two detached true 
opinions in their stead, would, even if it were possible, only serve 
to break up that coherency of character and conduct which it is 
one of the chief objects of moralists and the great art of living to 
produce. For a true opinion does not necessarily bring in its train 
all the other true opinions that are logically connected with it. 
On the contrary, it is only too notorious a fact in the history of 
belief, that not merely indi\dduals but whole societies are capable 
1 CEuvres, vol. v, p. 354. 



154 JOHN MORLEY 

of holding at one and the same time contradictory opinions and 
mutually destructive principles. On the other hand, neither 
does a false opinion involve practically all the evil consequences 
deducible from it. For the results of human inconsistency are 
not all unhappy, and if we do not always act up to virtuous prin- 
ciple, no more do we always work ou:t to its remotest inference 
every vicious principle. Not insincerity, but inconsistency, has 
constantly turned the adherents of persecuting precepts into 
friends of tolerant practice." 

" It is a comparatively small thing to persuade a superstitious 
person to abandon this or that article of his superstition. You 
have no security that the rejection of the one article which you 
have displaced will lead to the rejection of any other, and it is 
quite possible that it may lead to all the more fervid an adhesion 
to what remains behind. Error, therefore, in view of such con- 
siderations may surely be allowed to have at least a provisional 
utility." 

Now undoubtedly the repudiation of error is not at all the same 
thing as embracing truth. People are often able to see the force 
of arguments that destroy a given opinion, without being able 
to see the force of arguments for the positive opinion that ought 
to replace it. They can only be quite sure of seeing both, when 
they have acquired not merely a conviction that one notion is 
false and another true, but have furthermore exchanged a gener- 
ally erroneous way of thinking for a generally correct way. Hence 
the truly important object with every one who holds opinions 
which he deems it of the highest moment that others should ac- 
cept, must obviously be to reach people's general ways of think- 
ing ; to stir their love of truth ; to penetrate them with a sense 
of the difference in the quality of evidence ; to make them will- 
ing to listen to criticism and new opinion ; and perhaps above all 
to teach them to take ungrudging and daily trouble to clear up in 
their minds the exact sense of the terms they use. 

If this be so, a false opinion, like an erroneous motive, can 
hardly have even a provisional usefulness. For how can you 
attack an erroneous way of thinking except in detail, that is to say, 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 155 

through the sides of this or that single wrong opinion ? Each of 
these wrong opinions is an illustration and type, as it is a standing 
support and abettor, of some kind of wrong reasoning, though 
they are not all on the same scale nor all of them equally instruc- 
tive. It is precisely by this method of gradual displacement of 
error step by step, that the few stages of progress which the race 
has yet traversed, have been actually achieved. Even if the 
place of the erroneous idea is not immediately taken by the cor- 
responding true one, or by the idea which is at least one or two 
degrees nearer to the true one, still the removal of error in this 
purely negative way amounts to a positive gain. Why ? For 
the excellent reason that it is the removal of a bad element which 
otherwise tends to propagate itself, or even if it fails to do that, 
tends at the best to make the surrounding mass of error more in- 
veterate. All error is what physiologists term fissiparous, and 
in exterminating one false opinion you may be hindering the 
growth of an uncounted brood of false opinions. 

Then as to the maintenance of that coherency, interdepend- 
ence, and systematization of opinions and motives, which is 
said to make character organic, and is therefore so highly prized 
by some schools of thought. No doubt the loosening of this or 
that part of the fabric of heterogeneous origin, which constitutes 
the character of a man or woman, tends to loosen the whole. But do 
not let us feed ourselves upon phrases. This organic coherency, 
what does it come to ? It signifies in a general way, to describe it 
briefly, a harmony between the intellectual, the moral, and the 
practical parts of human nature ; an undisturbed cooperation 
between reason, affection, and will ; the reason prescribing noth- 
ing against which the affections revolt, and proscribing nothing 
which they crave ; and the will obeying the joint impulses of these 
two directing forces, without liability to capricious or extrava- 
gant disturbance of their direction. Well, if the reason were 
perfect in information and method, and the affections faultless in 
their impulse, then organic unity of character would be the final 
consummation of all human improvement, and it would be crimi- 
nal, even if it were possible, to undermine a structure of such 



156 JOHN MORLEY 

priceless value. But short of this there can be no value in co- 
herency and harmonious consistency as such. So long as error 
is an element in it, then for so long the whole product is vitiated. 
Undeniably and most fortunately, social virtues are found side 
by side with speculative mistakes and the gravest intellectual 
imperfections. We may apply to humanity the idea which, as 
Hebrew students tell us, is imputed in the Talmud to the Su- 
preme Being. God prays, the Talmud says, and his prayer is 
this: " Be it my will that my mercy overpower my justice." And 
so with men, with or without their will, their mercifulness 
overpowers their logic. And not their mercifulness only, but 
all their good impulses overpower their logic. To repeat the 
words which I have put into the objector's mouth, we do not 
always work out every vicious principle to its remotest infer- 
ence. What, however, is this but to say that in such cases 
character is saved, not by its coherency, but by the opposite ; to 
say not that error is useful, but what is a very different thing, 
that its mischievousness is sometimes capable of being averted or 
minimized ? 

The apologist may retort that he did not mean logical coher- 
ency, but a kind of practical everyday coherency, which may be 
open to a thousand abstract objections, yet which still secures 
both to the individual and to society a number of advantages that 
might be endangered by any disturbance of opinion or motive. 
No doubt, and the method and season of chasing erroneous 
opinions and motives out of the mind must always be a matter 
of much careful and farseeing consideration. Only, in the course 
of such consideration, let us not admit the notion in any form 
that error can have even provisional utility. For it is not the 
error which confers the advantages that we desire to preserve, 
but some true opinion or just motive or high or honest sentiment, 
which exists and thrives and operates in spite of the error and in 
face of it, springing from man's spontaneous and unformulated 
recognition of the real relations of things. This recognition is 
very faint in the beginnings of society. It grows clearer and 
firmer with each step forward. And in a tolerably civilized age 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 157 

it has become a force on which you can fairly lean with a con- 
siderable degree of assurance. 

And this leads to the central point of the answer to the argu- 
ment from coherency of conduct. In measuring utility you have 
to take into account not merely the service rendered to the objects 
of the present hour, but the contribution to growth, progress 
and the future. From this point of view most of the talk about 
unity of character is not much more than a glorifying of stagna- 
tion. It leaves out of sight the conditions necessary for the con- 
tinuance of the unending task of human improvement. Now 
whatever ease may be given to an individual or a generation by 
social or religious error, such error at any rate can conduce 
nothing to further advancement. That, at least, is not one of 
its possible utilities. 

This is also one of the answers to the following plea. ''Though 
the knowledge of every positive truth is an useful acquisition, 
this doctrine cannot without reservation be applied to negative 
truth. When the only truth ascertainable is that nothing can 
be known, we do not, by this knowledge, gain any new fact by 
which to guide ourselves." ^ But the negative truth that nothing 
can be known is in fact a truth that guides us. It leads us away 
from sterile and irreclaimable tracts of thought and emotion and 
so inevitably compels the energies which would otherwise have 
been wasted, to feel after a more profitable direction. By leav- 
ing the old guide-marks undisturbed, you may give ease to an 
existing generation, but the present ease is purchased at the cost 
of future growth. To have been deprived of the faith of the old 
dispensation is the first condition of strenuous endeavor after the 
new. 

No doubt history abounds with cases in which a false opinion, 
on moral or religious subjects, or an erroneous motive in conduct, 
has seemed to be a stepping-stone to truth. But this is in no 
sense a demonstration of the utility of error. For in all such 
cases the erroneous opinion or motive was far from being wholly 

1 Mill's Three Essays on Religion, p. 73. I have offered some criticisms 
on the whole passage in Critical Miscellanies, Second Series, pp. 300-304. 



158 JOHN MORLEY 

erroneous, or wholly without elements of truth and reality. If it 
helped to quicken the speed or mend the direction of progress, 
that must have been by virtue of some such elements within it. 
All that was error in it was pure waste, or worse than waste. It 
is true that the religious sentiment has clothed itself in a great 
number of unworthy, inadequate, depressing, and otherwise mis- 
leading shapes, dogmatic and liturgic. Yet on the whole the 
religious sentiment has conferred enormous benefits on civiliza- 
tion. This is no proof of the utility of the mistaken direction 
which these dogmatic or liturgic shapes imposed upon it. On 
the contrary, the effect of the false dogmas and enervating litur- 
gies is so much that has to be deducted from the advantages 
conferred by a sentiment in itself valuable and of priceless capa- 
bility. 

Yes, it will be urged, but from the historic conditions of the 
time, truth could only be conveyed in erroneous forms, and mo- 
tives of permanent price for humanity could only be secured in 
these mistaken expressions. Here I would again press the point 
of this necessity for erroneous forms and mistaken expressions 
being, in a great many of the most important instances, itself 
derivative, one among other ill consequences of previous moral 
and religious error. "It was gravely said," Bacon tells us, "by 
some of the prelates in the Council of Trent, where the doctrines 
of the Schoolmen have great sway, that the Schoolmen were like 
Astronomers, which did faigne Eccentricks and Epicycles and 
Engines of Orbs to save the Phenomena ; though they knew there 
were no such Things ; and in like manner that the Schoolmen 
had framed a number of subtile and intricate Axioms and 
Theorems, to save the practice of the Church." This is true of 
much else besides scholastic axioms and theorems. Subordi- 
nate error was made necessary and invented, by reason of some 
preexistent main stock of error, and to save the practice of the 
Church. Thus we are often referred to the consolation which 
this or that doctrine has brought to the human spirit. But 
what if the same system had produced the terror which made 
absence of consolation intolerable? How much of the neces- 






OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR 159 

sity for expressing the enlarged humanity of the Church in the 
doctrine of purgatory arose from the existence of the older 
unsoftened doctrine of eternal hell ? 

Again, how much of this alleged necessity of error, as alloy 
for the too pure metal of sterling truth, is to be explained by the 
interest which powerful castes or corporations have had in pre- 
serving the erroneous forms, even when they could not resist, or 
did not wish to resist, their impregnation by newer and better 
doctrine ? This interest Vas not deliberately sinister or malig- 
nant. It may be more correctly as well as more charitably ex- 
plained by that infirmity of human nature which makes us very 
ready to believe what it is on other grounds convenient to us to 
believe. Nobody attributes to pure malevolence the heartiness 
with which the great corporation of lawyers, for example, resist 
the removal of superfluous and obstructive forms in their prac- 
tice ; they have come to look on such forms as indispensable 
safeguards. Hence powerful teachers and preachers of all kinds 
have been spontaneously inclined to suppose a necessity, which 
had no real existence, of preserving as much as was possible of 
what we know to be error, even while introducing wholesome 
modification of it. This is the honest, though mischievous, con- 
servatism of the human mind. We have no right to condemn our 
foregoers ; far less to lavish on them the evil names of impostor, 
charlatan, and brigand, which the zealous unhistoric school of 
the last century used so profusely. But we have a right to say 
of them, as we say of those who imitate their policy now, that 
their conservatism is no additional proof of the utility of error. 
Least of all is it any justification for those who wish to have 
impressed upon the people a complete system of religious opin- 
ion which men of culture have avowedly put away. And, more- 
over, the very priests must, I should think, be supposed to have 
put it away also. Else they would hardly be invited deliberately 
to abdicate their teaching functions in the very seats where teach- 
ing is of the weightiest and most far-spreading influence. 

Meanwhile our point is that the reforms in opinion which have 
been effected on the plan of pouring the new wine of truth into 



i6o JOHN MORLEY 

the old bottles of superstition — though not dishonorable to the 
sincerity of the reformers — are no testimony to even the tem- 
porary usefulness of error. Those who think otherwise do not 
look far enough in front of the event. They forget the evil 
wrought by the prolonged duration of the error, to which the 
added particle of truth may have given new vitality. They over- 
look the ultimate enervation that is so often the price paid 
for the temporary exaltation. 

Nor, finally, can they know the truths which the error thus 
prolonged has hindered from coming to the birth. A strenuous 
disputant has recently asserted against me that "the region of 
the might have been lies beyond the limits of sane speculation." ^ 
It is surely extending optimism too far to insist on carrying it 
back right through the ages. To me at any rate the history of 
mankind is a huge pis-aller,^ just as our present society is ; a pro- 
digious wasteful experiment, from which a certain number of 
precious results have been extracted, but which is not now, nor 
ever has been at any other time, a final measure of all the possi- 
bilities of the time. This is not inconsistent with the scientific 
conception of history; it is not to deny the great law that 
society has a certain order of progress ; but only to urge that 
within that, the only possible order, there is always room for all 
kinds and degrees of invention, improvement, and happy or 
unhappy accident. There is no discoverable law fixing precisely 
the more or the less of these ; nor how much of each of them a 
community shall meet with, nor exactly when it shall meet 
with them. We have to distinguish between possibiHty and 
necessity. Only certain steps in advance are possible at a 
given time ; but it is not inevitable that these potential advances 
should all be realized. Does anybody suppose that humanity 
has had the profit of all the inventive and improving capacity 
born into the world ? That Turgot, for example, was the only 
man that ever lived who might have done more for society than 
he was allowed to do, and spared society a cataclysm ? No, — 

' Sir J. F. Stephen's Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, 2d ed., p. 19, note. 
- A condition which must be accepted for want of a better. — Editors. 



OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR i6i 

history is a pis-aller. It has assuredly not moved without the 
relation of cause and effect ; it is a record of social growth and 
its conditions ; but it is also a record of interruption and misad- 
venture and perturbation. You trace the long chain which has 
made us what we are in this aspect and that. But where are the 
dropped links that might have made all the difference? Uhi 
sunt eorum tabula qui post vota nuncupata perierunt ? ^ Where is 
the fruit of those multitudinous gifts which came into the world 
in untimely seasons ? We accept the past for the same reason 
that we accept the laws of the solar system, though, as Comte 
says, "we can easily conceive them improved in certain respects." 
The past, like the solar system, is beyond reach of modification 
at our hands, and we cannot help it. But it is surely the mere' 
midsummer madness of philosophic complacency to think that 
we have come by the shortest and easiest of all imaginable 
routes to our present point in the march ; to suppose that we 
have wasted nothing, lost nothing, cruelly destroyed nothing, 
on the road. What we have lost is all in the region of the 
"might have been," and we are justified in taking this into 
account, and thinking much of it, and in trying to find causes for 
the loss. One of them has been want of liberty for the human 
intelligence ; and another, to return to our proper subject, has 
been the prolonged existence of superstition, of false opinions, 
and of attachment to gross symbols, beyond the time when they 
might have been successfully attacked, and would have fallen 
into decay but for the mistaken political notion of their utility. 
In making a just estimate of this utility, if we see reason to be- 
lieve that these false opinions, narrow superstitions, gross sym- 
bols, have been an impediment to the free exercise of the in- 
telligence and a worthier culture of the emotions, then we are 
justified in placing the unknown loss as a real and most weighty 
item in the account against them. 

In short, then, the utmost that can be said on behalf of errors 
in opinion and motive is that they are inevitable elements in 

1 Where are the votive tablets of those who have perished after proclaim- 
ing their vows ? — Editors. 



1 62 JOHN MORLEY 

human growth. But the inevitable does not coincide with the 
useful. Pain can be avoided by none of the sons of men, yet the 
horrible and uncompensated subtraction which it makes from 
the value and usefulness of human life, is one of the most for- 
midable obstacles to the smoother progress of the world. And 
as with pain, so with error. .The moral of our contention has 
reference to the temper in which practically we ought to regard 
false doctrine and ill-directed motive. It goes to show that if 
we have satisfied ourselves on good grounds that the doctrine is 
false, or the motive ill directed, then the only question that we 
need ask ourselves turns solely upon the possibility of breaking 
it up and dispersing it, by methods compatible with the doctrine 
of liberty. Any embarrassment in dealing with it, due to a 
semi-latent notion that it may be useful to some one else, is a 
weakness that hinders social progress. 



VII 

THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 
William Hurrel Mallock 

[William Hurrel Mallock (1849-) is a well-known English writer of 
fiction and of poetry, and an essayist on philosophical, economic, and so- 
ciological topics. Probably his greatest distinction as a writer lies in this 
last field, in which he stands as an upholder of conservatism in dealing with 
the social problems of to-day. 

The Scientific Bases of Optimism was published originally in the Fort- 
nightly Review for 1889, and was reprinted in 1895 in the author's Studies of 
Contemporary Superstition. The title possibly fails to convey the actual im- 
port of the essay, as the writer's view as expressed here is that there are 
probably no scientific bases for optimism. Mr. Mallock means by this that 
the evidence of history fails to assure us that the progress of the human race 
is one of continuous betterment, and that an optimism which seeks in science 
justification for a belief in consistent human progress is mistaken and unwar- 
ranted. Religion, he states, has been at least an appreciable encouragement to 
human conduct and effort which have as their aims the enrichment of life ; but 
science has as yet produced no equivalent for the moral force of a religious 
faith. The increased knowledge of life which we have derived from science 
is, he thinks, as an ethical stimulus almost negligible. In this attitude the 
author represents the philosophical judgment of not merely many of our 
contemporary essayists, but of a number of novelists and dramatists who 
have made their writings the vehicles for a concrete philosophy. As a more 
or less popular analysis of optimism as a philosophical attitude — and this 
is to be distinguished from optimism as a commendable habit of mind — 
this essay is probably as effective as recent years have given us.] 

In many ways public attention in England has lately been called 
afresh to the great and universal question of what our modern 
science, if fatal to miraculous Christianity, will itself put, or allow 
to be put, in place of it. Only a few months since, in the pages 
of this Review, a new manifesto was issued by one of our best 
known Positivists, which purported to describe the exact reli- 

163 



1 64 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

gious position taken up by the infant Church of Humanity. 
Mr. John Morley has repubUshed in ten volumes what is, under 
one of its aspects, neither more nor less than an anti- Christian 
creed, imbedded in a series of criticisms. Other eminent writers 
equally anti-Christian have been again exhibiting their opinions 
to the gaze of the pitiable millions, who still sit hugging the 
broken fetters of theology. Indeed, we may say that during the 
past two years, each of the principal sects into which the Protes- 
tantism of science has split itself has appealed to us afresh, 
through the mouth of some qualified minister ; whilst the hold 
which such questions have on the public mind, whenever they 
are put in a way which the public can comprehend, has been 
curiously illustrated by the eagerness of even frivolous people, 
in devouring a recent novel, which on ordinary grounds would be 
unreadable, and whose sole interest consisted in its treatment of 
Christianity. 

Stimulated by the example of our scientific instructors, I 
propose to follow, as faithfully as I am able, in their footsteps. 
There are certain canons of criticism and there is a certain skep- 
tical temper, which they have applied to Christianity, and which 
they say has destroyed it. The same canons and temper I now 
propose to apply to the principal doctrine which they offer to the 
world as a substitute. 

Of course it will be said that thinkers who call themselves 
scientific offer us doctrines of widely different kinds. No doubt 
this is true. Amongst men of science as doctrinaires, there are as 
many sects as there are amongst theological Protestants ; nor was 
it without meaning, as I shall *how by and by, that I spoke of 
their creeds collectively, under the name of Scientific Protes- 
tantism. But though, like theological Protestants, they differ 
amongst themselves, and even quarrel amongst themselves, 
like theological Protestants also, they have fundamental points 
of agreement ; and it is solely with these last that I now propose 
to concern myself. Let us take first a hasty glance at their dif- 
ferences ; and it will be presently plain enough what the points 
of agreement are. 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 165 

Putting aside, then, all minor questions, Scientific Protes- 
tantism may be said, with substantial accuracy, to be composed 
at the present moment of five principal sects, which differ from 
one another mainly in the following ways. One of them, whilst 
denying, as they all do, both miracles and a future life, believes 
in a personal God, not unlike the Father of the Gospels. Indeed, 
it adopts most of what the Gospels say of Him. It accepts their 
statements ; it only denies their authority. There is a second 
sect which retains a God also, but a God, as it fancies, of a much 
sublimer kind. He is far above any relationship so definite as 
that of a father; indeed, we gather that he would think even 
personality vulgar. If we ask what he is, we receive a double 
answer. He is a metaphysical necessity ; he is also an object of 
sentiment ; and he is apprehended alternately in a vague sigh 
and a syllogism. He is, in fact, a God of the very kind that 
Faust described so finely when engaged in seducing Margaret. 
Neither of these two sects is greatly admired by a third, which 
regards the God of the first as a mutilated relic of Christianity, 
and the God of the second as an idle, maundering fancy. It has, 
however, an object of adoration of its own, which it declares, like 
St. Paul, as the reality ignorantly worshiped by the others. Its 
declaration, however, unlike St. Paul's, is necessarily of extreme 
brevity, for this Unknown God is nothing else than the Unknow- 
able. It is the philosopher's substance of the universe underly- 
ing phenomena ; and it raises our lives somehow by making us 
feel our ignorance of it. These three sects we may call Unita- 
rians, Deists, and Pantheists. There is a fourth which consid- 
ers them all three ridiculous ; but the third, with its Unknow- 
able, the most ridiculous of all. This fourth sect has also its 
God, which is best described by saying that it differs from the 
Unknowable in being known in one particular way. It is re- 
vealed in a general tendency, discoverable in human affairs, 
which, taking one thousand years with another, is alleged on the 
whole to make for righteousness or for progress. The individ- 
ual man is not made in God's image ; but the fortunes or the 
misfortunes of a sufficient number of men are something still 



1 66 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

better — they are the manifestations of God himself. Lastly, 
we have a fifth sect, nearest akin to the fourth, but differing 
from it and from all the others in one important particular. It 
rids itself of any idea of God altogether, as a complete superfluity. 
An object of adoration, like all the others, it has ; and, like the 
fourth, it finds this object in the tendencies of human history. 
But why, it asks, should we call them the manifestations of God ? 
Why wander off to anything so completely beside the point? 
They are not the manifestations of God. It is obvious what 
they are ; they are the manifestations of Humanity. We have 
here, under our noses, in a visible and tangible form, the true ob- 
ject of all these sublime emotions, those hours of comforting con- 
templation, which men have been offering in vain to the acceptance 
of all the infinities in rotation. The object which we have 
scoured the universe and ransacked our fancies to find, has all 
the while been actually in contact with ourselves, and we our- 
selves have been actually integral parts of it. 

Here, then, classified with sufl&cient accuracy, are the principal 
forms of religion, which those who reject Christianity are now 
offering the world, in the name of science, as substitutes. Now 
the great fact which I wish to point out is this : however much 
the four first differ from one another and from the last, yet the 
main tenets of the last form an integral part of all. The wor- 
shipers of Humanity base their worship of it on certain beliefs 
as to evolution and progress, which give to human events some 
collective and coherent meaning. Every one of the other sects, 
let it worship what it will, bases its worship on precisely the 
same foundation. The Scientific Theists, denying both a future 
life and a revelation, and yet maintaining that God has moral 
relations with man, and that a man's personal pleasure is the 
least thing a man lives for, can explain such a doctrine only by 
afiirming a social progress which enlarges the purposes of the in- 
dividual and exhibits the purpose of God. The religion of the 
Unknowable is obviously but the religion of Humanity, with the 
Unknowable placed under it, like the body of a violincello, in the 
hope of producing a deeper moral vibration ; and of every form 



J 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 167 

of scientific theism we may say the same with equal even if not 
with such obvious truth. I do not suppose that anybody will 
dispute this; otherwise I should dwell on it longer, so as to place 
it beyond a doubt. I will take it then for admitted that in all 
scientific religions, in all our, modern religions that deny a future 
life and a revelation, the religion of Humanity is an essential, is 
indeed the main, ingredient. Let us now consider with a little 
more exactness what, as a series of propositions, this religion of 
Humanity is. 

Every religious doctrine has some idea at the bottom of it 
far simpler than the propositions in which alone it can be stated 
logically. Let us see what is the idea at the bottom of the reli- 
gious doctrine of Humanity. It appeals to us most forcibly per- 
haps under its negative aspect. Under that aspect we may seize 
it completely, thus. Let us take Shakespeare's lines — 

Life is a tale, 
Told by an idiot full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing. 

Let us realize fully all that these lines mean. The idea in ques- 
tion is a protest against that meaning. 

In this form, however, there is nothing scientific about it. It 
is merely the protest of an individual based on his own emotions, 
and any other individual may with equal force contradict it. 
To make it scientific it must be transferred to a different basis 
— from the subjective experience of the individual to the objec- 
tive history of the race. The value to each man of his own per- 
sonal lot depends entirely on what each man thinks it is. No one 
else can observe it ; therefore no one else can dispute about it. 
But the lot of the race at large is open to the observation of all. 
It is obvious to all that this lot is always changing, and the 
nature of these changes, whether they have any meaning in 
them or none, is not a matter of opinion, but of facts and induc- 
tions from facts. The religious doctrine of Humanity asserts 
that they have a meaning. It asserts that they follow a certain 
rational order, and that whether or no they are related to the 



1 68 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

purposes of any God, they have a constant and a definite relation 
to ourselves. It asserts that, taken as a whole, they have been, 
are, and will be, always working together — though it may be 
very slowly — to improve the kind of happiness possible for the 
human being, and to increase the numbers by whom such happi- 
ness will be enjoyed. 

Here, put in its logical and categorical form, is the primary 
doctrine common to all our scientific religions. The instant, how- 
ever, it is thus expressed, another proposition, through a process 
of logical chemistry, adheres to it and becomes part of its struc- 
ture. This proposition relates not to the tendencies of the race, 
but to the constitution of the average individual character. It 
asserts, and very truly, that a natural element in that character 
is sympathy ; but it asserts more than this. It asserts that sym- 
pathy, even as it exists now, is a feeling far stronger and wider 
than has usually been supposed ; that it is capable, even now, 
when once the idea of progress has been apprehended, of making 
the fortunes of the race a part of the fortunes of the individual, 
and inspiring the individual to work for the progress in which he 
shares ; and it asserts that, strong as sympathy is now, it will 
acquire, as time goes on, a strength incalculably greater. 

These two propositions united may be summed up thus. The 
Human Race as a whole is a progressive and improving organ- 
ism ; and the conscience, on the part of the individual that such 
is the case, will be the principal cause of its continued progress 
in the future, and will make the individual a devoted and happy 
partaker of it. 

Here is the religion of Humanity reduced to its simplest ele- 
ments. I have called it the reUgion of Humanity because the 
name is now familiar, and may help to show the reader what it is 
I am talking about. But having used it thus far, I shall now 
beg leave to change it, and instead of the religion of Humanity 
I shall speak of the creed of Optimism. For my present purpose 
it is a great deal clearer. A religion is a creed touched with emo- 
tion ; a creed is nothing but a dry series of propositions. My 
present purpose is simply to examine two dry propositions, and 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 169 

I will put all questions of emotion as far as possible into the back- 
ground. I am aware that the word Optimism is sometimes used 
with a meaning which many devotees of the religion of Humanity 
would repudiate. George Eliot, for instance, declared she was 
not an Optimist. Things were not for the best, she said; but 
they were always tending to get better. She accordingly said 
that she would sooner describe herself as a Meliorist. Nobody 
again lays greater or more solemn weight on the doctrine of prog- 
ress than does Mr. John Morley ; and yet nobody would more 
bitterly ridicule the doctrines of Dr. Pangloss. But in spite of 
the sober and even somber view which such thinkers take of the 
human lot, they still believe that it holds some distinct and 
august meaning, that the tides of affairs, however troubled, do 
not eddy aimlessly, and do not flow towards the darkness, but 
keep due on towards the light, however distant. They believe, 
in short, that the human lot has something in it, which makes it, 
in the eyes of all who can see clearly, a thing to be acquiesced 
in not merely with resignation, but devoutness. The soberest 
adherents of the religion of Humanity admit as much as this; 
and no violence is done to the meaning, or even to the associa- 
tions of the word, if all who admit thus much, from the most to 
the least sanguine, are classed together under the common name 
of Optimists. 

And now having seen what Optimism is, let us before going 
farther, make ourselves quite clear as to what results on life its 
exponents claim for it. They do not claim for it, as has been 
sometimes claimed for Christianity, that it is the foundation of 
the moral code. Our modern Optimists, without a single excep- 
tion, hold the foundations of the moral code to be social. Ac- 
cording to their theory, all its cardinal precepts have been the 
results not of belief, but of experience, and simply represent the 
conditions essential to social union. Belief, in certain important 
ways, may modify them; but it neither created them nor can 
substantially change them. Christianity, for instance, has put 
chastity on a pedestal, but it was not Christianity that made 
adultery a crime, nor would the completest atheism enable us to 



lyo WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

construct a society which could live and thrive without some 
sexual discipline. This is the view taken by modern science, and 
we may all accept it, as far as it goes, for true. Since then the 
propositions which compose the creed of Optimism are not prop- 
ositions from which the moral code is deduced, what moral re- 
sult is supposed to spring from an assent to them ? The result is 
supposed to be this — not any new assent to the reasonableness 
of that code, but a new heart in obeying it. In other words, the 
end of moral conduct being the welfare of society, our assent to 
the creed of Optimism makes that welfare incalculably nearer 
and dearer to us than it would be otherwise, and converts a mere 
avoidance of such overt acts as would injure it into a willing, a 
constant, an eager effort to promote it. This is what Optimism, 
when assented to, and acting on the emotions, claims to do for 
conduct; and indeed it is no slight thing. It is a thing that 
makes all the difference between the Hfe of a race of brutes, and 
the life of a race with something which we have hitherto called 
divine in it. For those who deny any other life but the present, 
what Optimism announces is practically the re-creation of the 
soul, and our redemption from the death of an existence merely 
selfish and animal. Optimism announces this, and of aU scien- 
tific creeds it alone pretends to do so ; and if its propositions are 
true, there are plausible grounds for arguing that a genuine reli- 
gion of the kind described will result from it. 

And now we come to the question which I propose to ask — 
Are its propositions true ? Or are we certain that they are true ? 
And if we are certain, on what kinds of evidence do we base our 
certainty ? We have already got them into condition to be sub- 
mitted to this inquiry. We have stripped them, so to speak, for 
the operation. There they stand, two naked propositions, 
whose sole claim to our acceptance is that they are scientific 
truths, that they are genuine inductions from carefully observed 
facts, that they have been reached legitimately by the daylight 
of reason, that prejudice and emotion have had nothing to do 
with the matter ; that they stand, in short, on precisely the same 
footing as any accepted generalization of physics or physiology. 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 171 

One of them, as we have seen, is a proposition relating to the 
changes of human history; the other is a proposition relating to 
the sympathetic capacity of the individual. 

I propose to show that the first is not as yet a legitimate gen- 
eralization at all ; that the facts of the case as at present known, 
not only are insufficient, but point in two opposite ways, that the 
certainty with which the proposition is held by our scientific in- 
structors is demonstrably due to some source quite other than sci- 
entific evidence, and finally, that even if, in any sense, the propo- 
sition should be found true, the truth would be found inadequate 
to the expectations based on it. 

This is what I propose to show with regard to the proposition 
asserting progress. With regard to the proposition that deals 
with human sympathy, I propose to show that it is less scientific 
still, that whilst here and there an isolated fact, imperfectly ap- 
prehended, may suggest it, the great mass of facts absolutely 
and hopelessly contradict it, and furthermore, that even grant- 
ing its truth, its truth would cut both ways, and annihilate the 
conclusions it supported. 

This last proposition we will consider first. Let us repeat it 
in set terms. It asserts that the sympathetic feelings of the 
average man are sufiiciently strong and comprehensive to make 
the alleged progress of the human race a source of appreciable 
and constant satisfaction to himself. And the satisfaction in 
question is no mere pensive sentiment, no occasional sunbeam 
gilding an hour of idleness; but it is a feeling so robust and 
strong that it can not only hold its own amongst our ordinary 
joys and sorrows, but actually impart its own color to both. It 
will also, as progress continues, increase in strength and impor- 
tance. 

Now in considering if this is true, let us grant all that can be 
granted ; let us grant, for argument's sake, that progress is an 
acknowledged reality — that human history, if regarded in a way 
sufficiently comprehensive, shows us, written across it in gigantic 
characters, some record of general and still continuing improve- 
ment. Are our characters such that the knowledge of this fact 



172 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

will really cause us any flow of spirits sufficiently vivid to take 
rank amongst our personal joys, and to buoy us up in personal 
despondency and sorrow ? Or again, are they such that this gen- 
eral improvement of the race will be an object nearer our hearts 
than our own private prosperity, and will really incite us to sacri- 
fice our strength and our pleasures to its promotion ? To these 
questions there are two answers, which I shall give separately. 

The first answer is, that from one point of view they are 
simply questions of degree. For instance, supposing it were 
suddenly made known to all of us, that some extraordinary 
amelioration in the human lot would, owing to certain causes, 
accomplish itself during the next ten days, the whole race would 
probably experience a sense of overmastering joy, through which 
ordinary sorrows and annoyances would hardly make themselves 
felt. Or again, should it be known that this glorious piece of 
progress were contingent on every one making some specified 
effort, we may safely say that for the time very few men would 
be idle. And again, should it be known that by indulgence in per- 
sonal passion the results of this progress would be grievously and 
visibly diminished, for ten days, doubtless, self-restraint would be 
general. But in proportion as we suppose the rate of the prog- 
ress to be slower, and the importance to the result of each sepa- 
rate act to be less, our satisfaction in the one and our anxiety 
about the other would dwindle, till the former would be percep- 
tible only in the hush of all other emotions ; and the latter, as 
affecting action, would cease to be perceptible at all. 

To convince ourselves that such is the law which this feeling 
would follow, we have only to look at the commonest experiences 
of life ; for the sympathy with general progress of which we are 
alleged to be capable, is not supposed to have anything miracu- 
lous about it, but to be simply a particular application of a 
faculty in daily exercise. Now an ordinary man is delighted if 
some great good fortune happens to some other who is very near 
and dear to him — if his son or his daughter or his brother, for 
instance, marries well and happily; but if the same good for- 
tune happens to some unknown connection, his delight is at best 



i 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 173 

of a very lukewarm kind ; whilst if he hears of a happy marriage 
in Germany, it is nonsense to pretend that he is really delighted 
at all. Again, if he reads in the Times of an accident to a train 
in America, he says it is shocking, and goes on with his breakfast; 
but if a telegram comes to inform him that his son was amongst 
the passengers, he at once is in torture till he learns if his son is 
safe. So too with regard to conduct, the consequences to be ex- 
pected from any given act will influence his choice or his 
avoidance of it in proportion to their nearness or their remote- 
ness, to their certainty or their uncertainty, to the clearness with 
which he is able to grasp them, and also to their objective magni- 
tude relative to the amount of effort required from himself in 
doing the act or in abstaining from it. This is evident in cases 
where the consequences are consequences to the doer. A reward 
to be given in ten years time stimulates no one as much as a 
reward to be given to-morrow ; nor does a fit of the gout hover- 
ing dimly in the future keep the hand from the bottle like a 
twinge already threatening. Again, if the ill consequences of 
an act otherwise pleasant have in them the smallest uncertainty, 
a numerous class is always ready to risk them ; and as the un- 
certainty becomes greater, this class increases. All intemper- 
ance, all gambling, all extravagance, all sports such as cricket 
and hunting, and the very possibility of a soldier's life as a 
profession, depend on this fact. Few men would enlist if they 
knew that they would be shot in a twelvemonth; few men 
would go hunting if they knew they would come home on a 
stretcher. And what is true of men's acts regarded as affecting 
themselves is equally true of them regarded as affecting others. 
Sympathy follows the same laws as selfishness. Supposing a 
young man knew that if he did a certain action his mother would 
instantly hear of it and die of grief in consequence, he would be 
a young man of very exceptional badness if this knowledge were 
not a violent check on him. But suppose the act were only one 
of a series, making his general conduct only a little worse, and 
suppose that the chance of his mother's hearing of it were slight, 
and that it would, if she did hear of it, cost her only one extra 



174 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

sigh, the check so strong in the first case would in this be ex- 
tremely feeble. Here again is a point more important still. In 
the case of any act, regarded as affecting others, which involves 
effort or sacrifice, the motive to perform it depends for its 
strength or weakness on the proportion between the amount of 
the sacrifice and the amount of good to be achieved by it. A 
man may be willing to die to save his wife's honor, but he will 
hardly be willing to do so to save her new ball dress, even though 
she herself thinks the latter of most value. A man would deny 
himself one truffle to keep a hundred men from starving, but he 
would not himself starve to give a hundred men one truffle. 
The effort is immense on one side, the result infinitesimal on the 
other, and sympathy does nothing to alter the unequal balance. 
Lastly, results to others, as apprehended by sympathy, even 
when not small themselves, are made small by distance. No 
man thinks so much of what will happen to his great-grand- 
children as he does of what will happen to his children ; nor 
would it be easy to raise money for building a hospital which 
would not be finished for fifteen hundred years. Sympathy then 
with other people, or with any cause or any object affecting 
them, influences our actions in proportion as the people are near 
to us, or as the objects are large, distinct, or important ; whence 
it follows that to produce a given strength of motive, the more 
distant an object is the larger and more distinct it must be. 

And now let us turn again to the progress of the human race ; 
and supposing it to be a fact, and accepting it as described by its 
prophets, let us consider how far our sympathies are really likely 
to be affected by it. Is it quick enough ? Is it distinct enough ? 
Is there a reasonable proportion between the efforts demanded 
from us on its behalf, and the results to be anticipated from these 
efforts ? And how far, in each individual case, are the resu^ 
certain or doubtful ? ^^ 

Now one of the first things which our scientific Optimists im- 
press on us is, that this progress is extremely slow. Before it has 
brought the general lot to a condition which in itself is even 
approximately satisfactory, "immeasurable geologic periods of 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 175 

time," Mr. Morley tells us, will have to intervene; and Mr. 
Frederic Harrison, in this Review, a month or two since, warned 
us not to be in a hurry. He is far more sanguine indeed than 
Mr. Morley ; but even he thinks that we must wait for three 
thousand years, before the results of Progress begin to be worth 
talking about. Now, "to a practical man," says Mr. Harrison, 
"three thousand years is an eternity." I quite agree with him ; 
to a practical man it is ; and thus, whether his calculations are 
accepted, or Mr. Morley's, our own efforts on behalf of the 
general welfare are divided by a practical eternity from their 
first appreciable fruits. Now since Mr. Harrison refers us to 
practical men, let us try to imagine, guided by our common ex- 
perience, how the knowledge that this kind of progress was a 
reality would be likely to affect the practical men we know. 
Let us first think how it would affect their feelings ; and then 
how, through their feelings, it would affect their actions. The 
two questions are separate, and involve different sets of consid- 
erations. 

To begin then with the question of mere feeling. If we wish 
to form some conjecture as to how men are likely to feel about the 
things of the remote future, we cannot do better than resort to a 
test which is suggested to us by the Optimists themselves, and 
consider how men feel about the things of the remote past. Of 
course, as we may see in the case of a man's own life, the feel- 
ings excited by the past differ in kind from those excited by the 
future ; but the intensity of the one, we may say with confidence, 
is a fair measure of the intensity of the other. If a man who has 
caused himself suffering by his own acts, forgets that suffering 
the first moment it is over, he is not likely to trouble himself 
about the possibility of its repetition. And the same thing will 
hold good as to our feeling for past and future generations. 
Events that are going to happen three thousand years hence will 
hardly be more to us than events which happened three thousand 
years ago. Now what man in any practical sense cares anything 
about what happened three thousand years ago ? To repeople 
the cities and temples of the past — Memphis, and Thebes, and 



176 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

Babylon — to see at the call of the imagination the earth give 
up her dead, and buried generations come and go before us, is no 
doubt an occupation that many of us find fascinating. But the 
pleasure of watching these afxevrjva Kapyjva ^ has nothing akin to any 
personal interest in them. Neither, again, has the interest taken 
in them by the historian. Were we to learn to-day for the first 
time that all the plagues of Egypt had been repeated ten times 
over, or that a million slaves had been tortured by Pharaoh Necho, 
nobody's spirits would be in the least damped by the intelligence. 
The strongest feelings producible by the longest contemplation 
of the greatest triumphs and the greatest misfortunes of antiq- 
uity are mere phantoms, mere wraiths, mere reflections of the 
reflections of shadows, when compared with the annoyance produ- 
cible by a smoky chimney. Supposing we were to discover that 
three thousand years ago there was a perfectly happy and a per- 
fectly civilized society, the conditions of which were still per- 
fectly plain to us, the discovery no doubt would be intensely 
interesting if it afforded us any model that we could ourselves 
imitate. But our interest would be centered in the thought not 
that other people had been happy, but that we, or that our chil- 
dren, were going to be. The two feelings are totally different. 
Supposing we were to discover on some Egyptian papyrus a re- 
ceipt for making a certain delicious tart, the pleasure we might 
take in eating the tart ourselves would have nothing to do with 
any gratification at the pleasure it gave Sesostris. The conclu- 
sion, then, that we may draw from our obvious apathy as to the 
happiness of our remote ancestors is that we are really equally 
apathetic as to the happiness of our remote descendants. As the 
past ceases to be remote — as it becomes more and more recent, 
some faint pulsations of sympathy begin to stir in us ; when we 
get to the lives of our grandfathers the feeling may be quite 
recognizable ; when we get to the lives of our fathers, it may be 
strong. This is true ; and the same thing holds good as to the 
future. We may feel strongly about the lives of our children, 
more weakly about the lives of our grandchildren, and then pres- 
* Fleeting shades. — Editors. 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 177 

ently we cease to have any feeling at all. Were we promised 
that progress in the future would be quicker than progress in 
the past, the case would change in proportion to this promised 
quickness ; but this is precisely what we are not promised. 

I said that this appeal to the past was suggested by the Op- 
timists themselves. The feelings indeed which they dwell upon 
as producible are somewhat different from those on which I have 
just commented. But they are less to the point as indicating 
the possibility of any sympathy with the future, and are seen 
when analyzed to be even more fantastic. What the Optimist 
tells us that we ought to feel, can feel, and if we do but think 
over things, must feel, is not so much gladness or sorrow at our 
ancestors having been happy or unhappy, as gratitude towards 
them for the happiness that their efforts have secured for us. 
Now the efforts of our ancestors have secured us a great number 
of things ; if they have secured us our happiness they have 
secured us also our afflictions. If we owe to them our present 
medical skill, we also owe to them consumption, and gout, and 
scrofula. Our gratitude therefore is to be of a somewhat eclectic 
character. Its object is not the whole of our ancestors, but only 
that proportion of them whose lives have been beneficial to us. 
But we can never know accurately what that proportion is. It 
is an undistinguished part of a dimly apprehended whole. How 
are we to be grateful to a shadowy abstraction like this ? Mr. 
Harrison might tell us, and he actually does tell us, that we 
know our ancestral benefactors through certain illustrious speci- 
mens of them — "poets, artists, thinkers, teachers, rulers, dis- 
coverers;" indeed, he says that the worshiping gratitude in 
question "is felt in its most definite mode when we enter into 
communion" with such great men as these. This no doubt 
makes the idea clearer ; but it only does so to make its absurdity 
clearer also. Some great men have done good to posterity — 
good which we feel now ; but many have done evil ; and there 
are wide differences of opinion as to which of them has done 
what. Is Frederick the Great, for instance, to be the object of 
worshiping gratitude, or of aversion? Are we to enter into 



178 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

communion with him, or avoid him? Or supposing all such 
doubts as these to be settled, and the calendar of the saints of 
progress to be edited to the satisfaction of us all, there are diffi- 
culties still greater behind. Many men whose actions have l^een 
undoubtedly beneficial, have been personally of exceedingly 
doubtful character ; the good they have done to posterity has 
been in many cases unforeseen and unintended by themselves ; 
or even if they have foreseen it, love of posterity has not been 
their motive in doing it. Who, for instance, feels any worship- 
ing gratitude to Lord Bacon ? We may admire his genius, or 
may recognize his services ; but benefit to us was not his object 
in producing them, and therefore our gratitude is not their rec- 
ompense. It is as irrational to be grateful for an unintended 
benefit as it is to be angry for an unintended injury. Of course 
we have some feeling about such great men. It is shown in its 
strongest form in the people we call hero- worshipers. But the 
feeling of the hero-worshiper is the very reverse of the vica- 
rious feeling for humanity postulated by our Optimists. The 
hero-worshiper admires his heroes because they differ from the 
rest of mankind, not because they resemble and represent them. 
Even could we imagine that one or two great men actually fore- 
saw our existence, and toiled for us with a prophetic love, we 
cannot imagine this of the great masses of our predecessors. 
So far as they are concerned, we are the accidental inheritors of 
goods which they laid up for themselves ; and if there is any rea- 
son to praise them for what they have done well, there is equal 
reason to grumble at them for not having done it better. 

If these reflections do not appear conclusive, let us turn from 
our ancestral benefactors to our remote contemporary bene- 
factors. Our attitude towards them will enlighten us some- 
what further. To some of the remotest of our contemporaries 
we owe some of our homeliest comforts. To take one instance 
out of many, we owe tea to the Chinese. Now does any English 
tea-drinker feel any worshiping gratitude towards the Chinese ? 
We care for them as little as they care for us ; and if learnt to- 
morrow that the whole Chinese race was a myth, it is doubtful 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 179 

if one of us would eat a worse dinner for the news. If we feel so 
little about remote benefactors who are living, we shall hardly 
feel more about remote benefactors who are dead; and we 
shall feel less about remote recipients of benefits who will not be 
born for an eternity. 

To sum up, then, what experience teaches us as the extent to 
which an idea like that of human progress, moving imperceptibly 
to a goal incalculably distant, is able to affect the feelings of the 
ordinary individual, we must say that there is no evidence of any 
sort or kind that for practical purposes it is able to affect them 
. at all. 

And now let us pass on from this consideration to another. 
The emotions required by the Optimist we have shown to be not 
possible. Let us now consider how, supposing they were possible, 
they would be likely to influence action. We shall see that their 
influence, at the best, would be necessarily very feeble ; and that 
it would be enfeebled by the very conditions which we mainly 
counted on to strengthen it. Supposing the human race could 
last only another two years, even Mr. Harrison would admit that 
we might well be indifferent about improving it, and feel sad 
rather than elated at its destiny. As it is, Mr. Harrison, though 
he cannot say that it is eternal, yet promises it a duration which 
is an eternity for all practical purposes ; and he conceives that 
in doing this he is investing it with interest and with dignity. 
He thinks that, within limits, the longer the race lasts, the more 
worthy of the service it will seem to our enlightened reason. 
One of the most solemn reflections which he presses on our hearts 
is this, that the consequences of each one of our lives will con- 
tinue ad infinitum. 

Now, from one point of view Mr. Harrison is perfectly right. 
Granting that we believe in progress, and that our feelings are 
naturally affected by it, among the chief elements in it which 
cause it thus to affect them will be its practical eternity — its 
august magnitude. But the moment we put these feelings, as 
it were, into harness, and ask them to produce for us action and 
self-sacrifice, we shall find that the very elements which have 



i8o WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

excited the wish to act have an equal tendency to enervate the 
will. We shall find that, as the porter in Macbeth says, they are 
"equivocators." They "provoke the desire, but take away the 
performance." For the longer the period we assign to the dura- 
tion of the human race and of progress, the mightier the propor- 
tions of the cause we are asked to work for, the smaller will be the 
result of our efforts in proportion to the great whole ; less and less 
would each additional effort be missed. If the consequences of 
our lives ceased two years after our death, the power of these con- 
sequences, it is admitted, would be slight either as a deterrent or a 
stimulant. Mr. Harrison thinks that they will gain force, through 
our knowledge that they will last ad infinitum. But he quite for- 
gets the other side of the question, that the longer they last they 
are a constantly diminishing quantity, ever less and less appreci- 
able by any single human being, and that we can only think of 
them as infinite at the expense of thinking of them as infinitesi- 
mal. 

Now, as I pointed out before, it is a rule of human conduct 
that there must to produce an act be some equality between the 
effort and the expected result ; but in the case of any effort ex- 
pended for the sake of general progress there is no equality at all. 
And not only is there no equality, but there is no certain connec- 
tion. The best-meant efforts may do harm instead of good ; and 
if good will be really done by them, it is impossible to realize what 
good. How many workmen of the present day would refuse an 
annuity of two hundred a year, on the chance that by doing so 
they might raise the rate of wages one per cent in the course of 
three thousand years ? But why talk of three thousand years ? 
Our care, as a matter of fact, does not extend three hundred. 
Do we any of us deny ourselves a single scuttle of coals, so as to 
make our coal fields last for one more unknown generation ? It 
is perfectly plain we do not. The utter inefficacy of the motives 
supplied by devotion to progress, for its own sake, may at once 
be realized by comparing them with the motives supplied by de- 
votion to it for the sake of Christianity. The least thing that 
the Christian does to others he does to Christ. However slight 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM i8i 

the result, Christ judges it by the effort and the intention ; a sin- 
gle mite may be valued by him as much as a thousand pounds; 
and however far away from us may be the human beings we bene- 
fit, Christ, who is served through them, is near. But the naked 
doctrine of progress has no idea in it at all analogous to this idea 
of Christ. Compared with Christianity it is like an optical in- 
strument with some essential lens wanting. Christianity made 
our infinitesimal influence infinite; scientific Optimism makes 
our infinite influence infinitesimal. 

But perhaps it will be said that the idea of general progress is 
not supposed to move and stimulate us directly, but is embodied 
for each one of us in some homely and definite service which we 
can do to those about us ; and that we do not do such service for 
the love of the race in general, but rise to the general love through 
doing the particular services. The answer to this is obvious. 
If this is all that is claimed for the idea of progress, all claim for 
it that it influences action is abandoned. It does not tend to 
make men energetic, philanthropic, and useful who are not so nat- 
urally. Such men it leaves exactly as it finds them — the self- 
ish, selfish still, and the filthy, filthy still. It affects those only 
who act well independently of it ; and all that it can be supposed 
to do for these is not to make them choose a particular line of 
conduct, but to give them a new excuse for being pleased with 
themselves at having chosen it. This brings us back to the ques- 
tion of mere feeling ; and the feeling supposed to be produced by 
the idea of progress, we have already seen to be a mere fancy and 
illusion. As I have taken special care to point out, nobody 
claims for Optimism that it supplies us with a rule of right. 
That is supplied by social science and experience. What is 
claimed for it is, that it gives us new motives for obeying this 
rule, and a feeling of blessedness in the thought that it is being 
obeyed. We have now seen that in no appreciable^ way has it 
any tendency to give us either. 

All this while we have been supposing that progress was a 
reality, and inquiring if it will excite certain feelings. Let us 
now reverse our suppositions. Let us suppose the admittedly 



i82 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

real thing to be our capacity for the feehngs, and inquire what 
grounds there are for believing in the progress which is to excite 
them. Of course the question is not one which can be argued 
out in a page or two ; but we can take stock in a general way 
of what the arguments are. The first feature that strikes us in 
human history is change. Do these changes follow any intelli- 
gible order ? If so, to what extent do they follow it ? And is it 
an order which can afford us any rational satisfaction ? Now 
that they follow some intelligible order to some extent is per- 
fectly undeniable. The advance of certain races from savagery 
to civilization, and from a civilization that is simple to a civili- 
zation that is complex, is a fact staring all of us in the face ; and 
with regard to certain stages of this advance, few people will 
seriously deny that it has been satisfactory. It is true that, 
putting aside all theological views of man, certain races of 
savages have in all probability been the happiest human animals 
that ever existed; still if we consider the earliest condition of 
the races that have become civilized, we may no doubt say that 
up to a certain point the advance of civilization made life a bet- 
ter thing for them. But is it equally plain that after a certain 
point has been past, the continuance of the advance has had the 
same sort of result ? The inhabitants of France under Henri IV 
may have been a happier set of men than its inhabitants under 
Clovis ; but were its inhabitants under Louis XVI a happier 
set of men than its inhabitants under Henri IV? Again, if 
civilizations rise, civilizations also fall. Is it certain that the 
new civilizations which in time succeed the old bring the human 
lot to a veritably higher level ? To answer these questions, or 
even to realize what these questions are, we must brand into 
our consciousness many considerations which, though when we 
think of them they are truisms, we too often forget to think of. 
To begin, then : Progress for those who deny a God and a future 
life means nothing, and can mean nothing but such changes as 
may make men happier ; and this meaning again further unfolds 
itself into a reference first to the intensity of the happiness ; 
secondly, to the numbers who partake in it. Thus, what is 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 183 

commonly called a superior civilization need not, after a certain 
step, indicate any real progress. It may even be a disguise of 
retrogression. It seems, for instance, hardly doubtful that in 
England the condition of the masses some fifty years ago was 
worse than it had been a hundred years before. The factory 
system during its earlier stages of development, though a main 
element in the most rapid advances of civilization ever known 
to the world, did certainly not add for the time to the sum total 
of happiness. The mere fact that it did not do so for the time 
is in itself no proof that it may not have done so since ; but it is 
a proof that the most startling advances in science, and the mas- 
tery over nature that has come of them, need not necessarily be 
things which in their immediate results can give any satisfac- 
tion to the well-wishers of the race at large. But we may say 
more than this. Not only need material civilization indicate 
no progress in the lot of the race at large, but it may well be 
doubted if it really adds to the happiness of that part of the race 
who receive the fullest fruits of it. It is difficult in one sense to 
deny that express trains and Cunard steamships are improve- 
ments on mail coaches or wretched little saiHng boats like the 
Mayflower. But are the public in trains happier than the public 
who went in coaches? Is there more peace or hope in the 
hearts of the men who go from New York to Liverpool in six 
days than there was in the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers ? No 
doubt we who have been brought up amongst modern appli- 
ances should be made miserable for the time if they were sud- 
denly taken away from us. But to say this is a very different 
thing from saying that we are happier with them than we should 
have been if we had never had them. A man would be miserable 
who, being fat and fifty, had to button himself into the waist- 
coat which he wore when he had a waist and was nineteen. But 
this does not prove that a large-sized waistcoat makes his mid- 
dle age a happier time than his youth. Advancing civilization 
creates wants, and it supplies wants ; it creates habits and it 
ministers to habits ; but it is not always exhilarating us with 
fresh surprises of pleasure. Suppose, however, we grant that 



i84 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

up to a certain point the increase of material wants, together 
with the means of meeting them, does add to happiness, it is 
perfectly evident that there is a point where this result ceases. 
A workman who dines daily off beefsteak and beer may be 
happier than one whose dinner is water and black bread ; but 
a man whose dinner is ten different dishes need not be happier 
than the man who puts up with four. There is a certain point, 
therefore, not an absolute point, but a relative point, beyond 
which advances in material civilization are not progress any 
longer — not even supposing all classes to have a proportionate 
share in it. Accordingly the fact that inventions multiply, 
that commerce extends, that distances are annihilated, that 
country gentlemen have big battues, that farmers keep fine 
hunters, that their daughters despise butter making, and that 
even agricultural laborers have pink window blinds, is not in 
itself any proof of general progress. Progress is a tendency 
not to an extreme, but to a mean. 

Let us now pass to another class of facts, generally held to 
show that progress is a reality; namely, the great men that 
civilization has produced. Let us, for instance, take a Shake- 
speare, or a Newton, or a Goethe, and compare them with the 
Britons and the Germans of the time of Tacitus. Do we not 
see an image of progress there? To this argument there is 
more than one answer. It is an argument that points to some- 
thing, but does not point to so much as those who use it might 
suppose. No doubt a man like Newton would be an impossibil- 
ity in an age of barbarism ; we may give to civilization the whole 
credit of producing him, and admit that he is an incalculable 
advance on the shrewdest of unlettered savages. But though 
we find that civilizations produce greater men than barbarism, 
we do not find that the modern civilizations produce greater 
men than the ancient. Were they all to meet in the Elysian 
Fields Newton would probably not find Euclid his inferior, nor 
would Thucydides show like a dwarf by Professor Freeman. 
Further, not only do the limits of exceptional greatness show 
no tendency to expand, but the existence, at any point, of 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 185 

exceptionally great men is no sure indication of any answering 
elevation amongst the masses, any more than the existence of 
exceptionally rich men is a sure indication that the masses are 
not poor. The intellectual superiority of Columbus to the 
American savages was, unfortunately, no sign that his followers 
were not in many ways inferior to them. 

What, then, is the evidence that progress, in the sense of an 
increasing happiness for an increasing number, is really a con- 
tinuous movement running through all the changes of history ? 
It cannot be said that there are no facts which suggest such a 
conclusion, but they are absurdly insufficient in number, and 
they are balanced by others equally weighty, and of quite an 
opposite character. Isolated periods, isolated institutions, do 
indeed very strikingly exhibit the movement in question. One 
of the most remarkable instances of it is the development of 
the Church of Rome, looked at from the Catholic standpoint. 
Again, we constantly find periods in a nation's history during 
which the national happiness has demonstrably moved onwards. 
Few of the phenomena on which the faith in progress rests have 
given to that faith such a violent stimulus as the rapid movement 
observable in such periods. A case in point is the immense and 
undoubted improvement which during the past forty years has 
taken place in the condition of the working classes in England ; 
and no doubt, in spite of the ruinous price paid for it, France 
purchased by the Revolution an improvement not dissimilar. 
But these movements are capable of an interpretation very 
different from that which our sanguine Optimists put on them. 
They resemble a cure from an exceptional disease rather than 
any strengthening of the normal health. The French Revo- 
lution has been thought by many to have been a chopping up 
of society and a boiling of it in Medea's caldron, from whence 
it should issue forth born into a new existence. In reality it 
resembled an ill-performed surgical operation, which may pos- 
sibly have saved the nation's life, but has shattered its nerves and 
disfigured it till this day. Whilst as for ordinary democratic 
reforms — and this is plainest with regard to those which have 



1 86 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

been most really needed — their utmost effect has been to cure 
a temporary pain, not to add a permanent pleasure. They 
have been pills, they have not been elixirs.^ 

The most authenticated cases, then, which we have of any 
genuine progress are to all appearance mere accidents and epi- 
sodes. They are not analogous to a man progressing, but to a 
tethered animal which has slipped getting up on its legs again. 
As to the larger movements which form the main features of 
history, such as the rise of the Roman Empire, these movements, 
like waves, are always observed to spend themselves ; and it is 
impossible to prove, without some aid from theology, that the 
new waves which have shaped themselves out of the subsided 
waters, are larger, higher, or more important than the last. This 
is true even of the parts of such movements as history princi- 
pally records ; but of the part, which for our modern Optimists 
is the most important — which is, indeed, the only important 
part for them, history can hardly be said to have left any gen- 
eral record at all. The important part of such movements is 
their relation to the happiness of the masses. Does any one 
pretend that we have any materials for tracing through the 
historic ages the flvictuations in the lot of the unnamed multi- 
tudes ? Here and there some riot, some servile war, or some 
Jacquerie, shows us that at a certain period the masses in some 
special district were miserable, and we can trace through other 
periods some legal ameKoration of their lot. But taking the 
historic periods of the world as a whole, the history of the hap- 
piness or the misery of the majority is a book of which every- 
thing has perished except some scattered fragments, the gaps 
between which can only be filled up by conjecture, in many cases 
not even by that ; which fail to suggest in any serious way that 

1 The causes of material or national advance will be probably recognized 
in time as being mainly, though not entirely, due to the personal ambitions 
of a gifted and vigorous minority ; and the processes which are now regarded 
as signs of a universal progress are constant cures, or attempts at cures, of 
the evils or maladjustments which are at first incident to any important 
change. 



i 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 187 

the happiness of the multitudes concerned has followed any- 
intelligible order, and which certainly negatives the supposition 
that there has been any continuous advance in it. Mr. Harri- 
son says that in three thousand years progress should at least 
be appreciable to the naked eye. Will Mr. Harrison, or any one 
else, maintain as scientifically demonstrated, that the children 
whipped to their work in our earlier English factories were hap- 
pier than the Egyptian brickmakers amongst the melons and 
the fleshpots ? 

There is, however, another hypothesis possible, which may- 
give the doctrine of progress a more scientific character. It 
may be said that though the changes of history hitherto have 
been seemingly vague and meaningless, they have been really 
preparatory for a movement which is about to begin now. 
Telegraphs, ocean steamers, express trains, and printing presses 
have, it may be admitted, done Httle for the general happiness 
as yet; their importance may have been slight if we regard 
them as mere luxuries: but all this while they have been knitting 
the races of men together ; they have been making the oneness 
of Humanity a visible and accomplished fact; and very soon 
we shall all of us start in company on a march towards the 
higher things that the future has in store for us. What shall 
we say to some idea of this sort — that progress is a certainty 
henceforward, though it may have been doubtful hitherto ? 
The idea is a pleasant one for the fancy to dwell upon, and it is 
easy to see how it may have been suggested by facts. But facts 
certainly give us no assurance that it is true ; they do but suggest 
it, as a cloud may suggest a whale. It is no doubt easier to 
conceive the possibility of a general onward movement in the 
future than it is to conceive that of it as a reality in the past. 
Indeed no one can demonstrate that it will not actually take 
place. All I wish to point out is that there is no certainty that 
it will ; and not only no certainty, but no balance of probability. 
The existing civilization, which some think so stable, and which 
seems, as I have said, to be uniting us into one community, 
contains in itself many elements of decay or of self-destruction. 



1 88 WILLIAM HURREL M.\LLOCK 

In spite of the way in which the Western races seem to have 
covered the globe with the network of their power and com- 
merce, they are outnumbered at this day in a proportion of more 
than two to one, by the vast nations who are utterly impervious 
to their influence — impervious to their ideas, and indifferent 
to their aspirations. What scientific estimate then can be made 
of the influence of the Mohammedan and Buddhist populations, 
to say nothing of the others equally alien to our civilization, who 
alone outnumber the entire brotherhood of the West? Who 
can forecast — to take a single instance — the part which may 
in the future be played by China? And again, who can fore- 
cast the effects of overpopulation ? And who can fail to foresee 
that they may be far-reaching and terrible ? How, in the face of 
disturbing elements like these, can the future of progress be 
anything more than a guess, a hope, an opinion, a poetic fancy ? 
At all events, whatever it is, it is certainly not science. 

Let us, however, suppose that it is science. Let us suppose 
that we have full and sufficient evidence to convince us of the 
reality and continuance of a movement, slow indeed as its 
exponents admit it to be, but evidently in the direction of some 
happy consummation in the future. Now what, let us ask, will 
this consummation be ? It is put before us by the creed of Op- 
timism as the ultimate justification of all our hope and enthusi- 
asm, and, as Mr. Morley says, of our "provisional acquiescence" 
in the existing sorrows of the world. Does any one, then, pro- 
fess to be able to describe it exactly to us? To ask this is no 
idle question. Its importance can be proved by reference to 
Mr. Harrison himself. He says that if a consummation in 
heaven is to have the least real influence over us, it is " not enough 
to talk of it in general terms." " The all-important point," 
he proceeds, " is what kind of heaven ? Is it a heaven of seraphic 
beatitude and unending hallelujahs as imagined by Dante and 
Milton, or a life of active exertion? And if of active exertion 
(and what can life mean without e.xertion?) of what kind of 
exertion?" Now with regard to heaven it would be perfectly 
easy to show that this demand for exact knowledge is unreason- 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 189 

able and unnecessary ; for part of the attraction of the alleged 
beatitude of heaven consists in the belief that it passes our 
finite understanding, that we can only dimly augur it, and 
that we shall be changed before we are admitted to it. But with 
regard to any blessed consummation on the earth, such details 
as Mr. Harrison asks for are absolutely indispensable. Our 
Optimists tell us that, on the expiration of a practical eternity, 
there will be the beginnings at any rate of a blessed and glorious 
change in the human lot. In Mr. Harrison's words, I say, What 
kind of a change ? Will it be a change tending to make life a 
round of idle luxury, or a course of active exertion ? And if of 
active exertion, of what kind of exertion ? Will it be practical 
or speculative? Will it be discovering new stars, or making 
new dyes out of coal tar ? No one can tell us. 

On one point no doubt we should find a consensus of opinion ; 
but this point would be negative, not positive. We should 
be told that poverty, overwork, most forms of sickness, and 
acute pain would be absent ; and surely it may be' said that this 
is a consummation fit to be striven for. No doubt it is ; but 
from the Optimist's point of view, this admission does abso- 
lutely nothing to help us. The problem is to construct a life of 
superlative happiness ; and to eliminate physical suffering is 
merely to place us on the naked threshold of our enterprise. 
Suppose I see in the street one day some poor orphan girl, utterly 
desolate, and crying as if her heart would break. That girl is 
certainly not happy. Let us suppose I see the same girl next 
day, equally desolate, but distracted by an excruciating tooth- 
ache. I could not restore her parents to her, but I can, we will 
say, cure her toothache, and I do. I ease her of a terrible pain. 
I cause her unutterable relief ; and no doubt in doing so I myself 
feel happy ; but as to the orphan all I do is this — I restore her 
to her original misery. And so far as the mere process of stamp- 
ing out pain is concerned, there is nothing to show that it might 
not leave life in no better position than that of an orphan cured 
of a toothache. Indeed, if we may trust the suggestion thrown 
out by optimistic writers, it would not, even so far as it went, 



igo WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

be an unmixed good. These writers have often hinted that pain 
and trouble probably deepen our pleasures ; so if pain and trouble 
were ever done away with, the positive blessings of life might, on 
their own showing, be not heightened but degraded. 

Again, let us approach the question from another side; and 
instead of regarding progress as an extinction of pain, let us 
regard it as the equitable distribution of material comforts 
amongst all. No one would wish to speak flippantly — or at 
all events no sane man can think lightly — of the importance 
of giving to all a sufficiency of daily bread. But however we 
realize that privation and starvation are miseries, it does not 
follow — indeed we know it not to be true — that a light heart 
goes with a full stomach. Or suppose us to conceive that in the 
future it would come to do so, and that men would be com- 
pletely happy when they all had enough to eat, would this be a 
consummation calculated to raise our enthusiasm, or move our 
souls with a solemn zeal to work for it ? Would any human 
being who was ever capable of anything that has ever been called 
a high conception of life, feel any pleasure in the thought of a 
Humanity, "shut up in infinite content," when once it had se- 
cured itself three meals a day, and smiling every morning a 
satisfied smile at the universe, its huge lips shining with fried 
eggs and bacon ? 

I am not for an instant saying that mere physical well-being 
is the only sort of happiness to which Optimists look forward. 
But it is the only sort of happiness about which their ideas are 
at all definite ; and I have alluded to it as I have done, merely 
to point out that their only definite ideas are ridiculously insuffi- 
cient ideas. I do not doubt for a moment that thinkers like 
Mr. Harrison anticipate for transfigured Humanity pleasures 
which to them seem nobler than the noblest we can enjoy now ; 
but about these pleasures I say there is no consensus of opinibn ; 
what opinion there is, is quite indefinite, and there is nothing to 
show that these pleasures will ever be realized, and judging 
from the hints we have of them, there is much to show that they 
would be impossible. To sum up then, the altered Humanity 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 191 

of the future, even granting that we are advancing towards it, 
may be compared to an image of which one part only is definite. 
It is not like an image with feet of clay and with a head of gold, 
but like an image with a stomach of clay, and everything else 
of cloud. 

We have now examined the creed of Optimism from two points 
of view, assuming in turn the truth of each one of its two propo- 
sitions, and inquiring into the truth of the other. We first 
assumed the reality of progress, and asked how far our sympathy 
was capable of being stimulated by it ; we next assumed the 
alleged capacities of our sympathy, and asked what grounds 
there were for any belief in a progress by which sympathy of the 
assumed kind could be roused. And we have seen that, so far 
as scientific evidence is concerned, both the propositions in ques- 
tion are unsupported and fanciful. 

There remains for us yet a third test to submit it to, and this 
will be found to be the most fatal of all. Let us assume, for 
argument's sake, that both the propositions are true; and we 
shall see that they contain in themselves elements by which 
their supposed meaning is annihilated. Let us assume, then, 
that progress will, in process of time, produce a state of society 
which we should all regard as satisfactory ; and let us assume 
that our sympathies are of such a strength and delicacy that the 
far-off good in store for our remote descendants will be a source 
of real comfort to our hearts and a real stimulus to our actions 
— that it will fill life, in fact, with moral meanings and motives. 
It will only require a very little reflection to show us that if 
sympathy is really strong enough to accomplish this work, it 
will inevitably be strong enough to destroy the work which it 
has accomplished. If we are, or if we should come to be, so 
astonishingly sensitive that the remote happiness of posterity 
will cause us any real pleasure, the incalculable amount of pain 
that will admittedly have preceded such happiness, that has 
been suffered during the countless years of the past, and will have 
to be suffered during the countless intervening years of the 
future, must necessarily convert such pleasure into agony. It 



192 



WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 



is impossible to conceive, unless we throw reality overboard 
altogether, and decamp frankly into dreamland — it is impos- 
sible to conceive our sympathy being made more sensitive to the 
happiness of others, without its being made also more sensitive 
to their misery. One might as well suppose our powers of sight 
increased, but increased only so as to show us agreeable objects ; 
or our powers of hearing increased, but increased only so as to 
convey to us our own praises. 

Can any one for an instant doubt that this is a fact ? Can 
he trick himself in any way into any, even the slightest, evasion 
of it ? Can he imagine himself, for instance, having a sudden 
interest roused in him, from whatever cause, in the fortunes of 
some young man, and yet not feel a corresponding shock if the 
young man should chance to be hanged for murder? The idea 
is ridiculous. The truth of the matter is, that unless our sym- 
pathies had a certain obtuseness and narrowness in them, we 
should be too tender to endure a day of life. The rose leaves 
might give a keener pleasure ; but we should be unable to think 
of it, because our skins would be lacerated with thorns. What 
would happen to us if, retaining the fastidiousness of man, we 
suddenly found that our nostrils were as keen as those of dogs ? 
We should be sick every time we walked through a crowded street. 
Were our sympathies intensified in a similar way, we should 
pass through life not sick, but broken-hearted. The whole 
creation would seem to be groaning and travailing together; 
and the laughter and rejoicing of posterity would be drowned by 
the intervening sounds, or else would seem a ghastly mockery. 

But suppose — we have been waiving objections, and we 
will now waive them again — suppose that the intervening pain 
does somehow not inconvenience us ; and that our sympathies, 
"on this bank and shoal of time, jump it," and bring us safely 
to the joy and prosperity beyond. Now this jump, on Mr. 
Harrison's own showing, will carry us across an eternity. It 
will annihilate the distance between our own imperfect condi- 
tion and our posterity's perfect condition. But how does 
Mr. Harrison imagine that it will stop there ? He admits that 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 



193 



all human existence will come to an end some day, but the end, 
he thinks, does not matter because it is so far ofif. But if sym- 
pathy acquires this power of jumping across eternities, the end 
ceases to be far off any longer. The same power that takes us 
from the beginnings of progress to the consummation of progress 
will take us from the consummation of progress to its horrible 
and sure destruction — to its death by inches, as the icy period 
comes, turning the whole earth into a torture chamber, and 
effacing forever the happiness and the triumph of man in a 
hideous and meaningless end. Knowing that the drama is 
thus really a tragedy, how shall we be able to pretend to our- 
selves that it is a divine comedy? It is true that death waits 
for all and each of us ; and yet we continue to eat, drink, and 
be merry : but that is precisely because our sympathies have not 
those powers which Mr. Harrison asserts they have, because 
instead of connecting us with what will happen to others in 
three thousand years, it connects us only slightly with what will 
happen to ourselves in thirty. 

We thus see that the creed of Optimism is composed of ideas 
that do not even agree with each other. They might do that, 
however, and yet be entirely false. The great question is, do 
they agree with facts ? and not only that, but are they forced 
on us by facts ? Do facts leave us no room for rationally con- 
tradicting or doubting them ? In a word, have they any basis 
even approximately similar to what would be required to sup- 
port a theory of light, or heat, or electricity, of the geologic 
history of the earth, or of the evolution of species ? Is the evi- 
dence for their truth as overwhelming and as unanimous as the 
evidence Professor Huxley would require to make him beheve 
in a miracle ? Or have they ever been submitted to the same 
eager and searching skepticism which has sought for and weighed 
every fact, sentence, and syllable that might tend to make in- 
credible our traditional conception of the Bible? They cer- 
tainly have not. The treatment they have met with has been 
not only not this, but the precise opposite. Men who claim 
to have destroyed Christianity in the name of science justify 



194 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

their belief in Optimism by every method that their science 
stigmatizes as most immoral. Mr. Harrison admits, with rela- 
tion to Christianity, that the Redemption became incredible 
with the destruction of the geocentric theory, because the world 
became a speck in the universe, infinitely too little for so vast 
a drama. But when he comes to defending his own religion of 
Optimism he says, "the infinite littleness of the world" is a 
thought we "will put away from us" as an "unmanly and 
unhealthy musing." Similarly Mr. John Morley, who admits 
with great candor that many facts exist which suggest doubts 
of progress, instead of examining these doubts and giving their 
full weight to them, tells us that we ought to set them aside as 
"unworthy." Was ever such language heard in the mouths of 
scientific men about any of those subjects which have formed 
their proper studies ? It is rather a parody of the language of 
such men as Mr. Keble, who declared that religious skeptics 
were too wicked to be reasoned with, and who incurred, for this 
reason more than any other, the indignant scorn of all our 
scientific critics. Which of such critics was ever heard to defend 
a theory of the authorship of Job or of the Pentateuch by declar- 
ing that any doubts of their doubts were "unmanly," or "un- 
healthy"? Who would answer an attack on the Darwinian 
theory of coral reefs by calling it " unworthy " ? or meet admitted 
difficulties in the way of a theory of light by following Mr. Har- 
rison's example, and saying, "we will put them aside"? 

Let the reader consider another statement explicitly made 
by Mr. John Morley relative to this very question of Optimism. 
He quotes the following passage from Diderot: "Does the 
narrative present me with some fact that dishonors human- 
ity? Then I examine it with the most rigorous severity. 
Whatever sagacity I may be able to command I employ in detect- 
ing contradictions that throw suspicion on the story. It is 
not so when the action is beautiful, lofty, noble." "Diderot's 
way,'' says Mr. Morley, "of reading history is not unworthy of 
imitation." Is it necessary to quote more? This astonishing 
sentence — not astonishing for the fact it admits, but for the 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 195 

naive candor of the admission — describes in a nutshell the 
method which men of science, who have attacked Christianity 
in the name of the divine duty of skepticism, and of a conscience 
which forbids them to believe anything not fully proved — this 
sentence describes the method which such men consider scientific 
when establishing a religion of their own. Let us swallow what- 
ever suits us ; whatever goes against us let us examine with the 
most rigorous severity. 

No feature in the history of modern thought is more instruct- 
ive than the contrast I have just indicated — the contrast 
between the skepticism, and the exactingness of science, in its 
attack on Christianity, and its abject credulity in constructing 
a futile substitute. That there is no universal, no continuous 
meaning in the changes of human history, that progress of some 
sort may not be a reaHty, I am not for a moment arguing. All 
I have urged hitherto is, that there is no evidence, such as would 
be accepted either in physical or philosophical science, to prove 
there is. The facts, no doubt, suggest any number of meanings, 
but they support none ; and if Professor Huxley is right in saying 
that it is very immoral in us to believe in such doubtful books 
as the Gospels, it must be far more immoral in him to believe 
in the meaning of human existence. What the spectacle of 
the world's history would really suggest to an impartial scientific 
observer, who had no religion and who had not contracted to 
construct one, is a conclusion eminently in harmony with the 
drift of scientific speculation generally. The doctrines of nat- 
ural selection and the survival of the fittest, imply on the part 
of nature a vast number of failures — failures complete or partial. 
The same idea may be applicable to worlds, as to species in this 
world. If we conceive, as we have every warrant for conceiving, 
an incalculable number of inhabited planets, the history of their 
crowning races will, according to all analogy, be various. Some 
will arrive at great and general happiness, some at happiness 
partial and less complete, some may very likely, as long as their 
inhabitants last, be hells of struggle and wretchedness. Now 
what to an impartial observer the history of the earth would 



196 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

suggest, would be that it occupied some intermediate position 
between the completest successes and the absolutely horrible 
failures — a position probably at the lower end of the scale, 
though many degrees above the bottom of it. Considered in 
this light its history becomes intelligible, because we cease 
to treat as hieroglyphs full of meaning a series of marks which 
have really no meaning at all. We shall see constant attempts 
at progress, we shall see progress realized in certain places up to 
a certain point ; but we shall see that after a certain point, the 
castle of cards or sand falls to pieces again ; and that others 
attempt to rise, perhaps even less successfully. We still see 
numberless words shaping themselves, but never any complete 
sentence. Taken as a whole, we shall be reminded of certain 
lines, which I have already alluded to, referring to an "idiot's 
tale." The destinies of humanity need not be all sound and 
fury ; but certainly regarding them as a whole, we shall have 
to say of them, that they are a tale without plot, without coher- 
ence, without interest — in a word, that they signify nothing. 

I do not say for a moment that this is the truth about Human- 
ity ; but that this is the kind of conclusion which we should prob- 
ably arrive at if we trusted to purely scientific observation, with 
no preconceived idea that life must have a meaning, and no in- 
terest in giving it one. No doubt such a view, if true, would be 
completely fatal to everything which to men, in what hitherto 
we have called their higher moments, has made life dignified, se- 
rious, or even tolerable. Hitherto in those higher moments they 
have risen, like the philosophers out of Plato's cavern, from their 
narrow selfish interests, into the light of a larger outlook, and 
seen that life is full of august meanings. But that light has not 
been the light of science. Science will give men a larger outlook 
also ; but it will raise them above their narrower interests, not to 
show them wider ones, but to show them none at all. If then 
the light that is in us is darkness, we may well say, how great is 
that darkness ! It is from this darkness that religion comes to 
deliver us, not by destroying what science has taught us, but by 
adding to it something that it has not taught us. 



THE SCIENTIFIC BASES OF OPTIMISM 197 

Whether we can believe in this added something or not is a 
point I have in no way argued. I have not sought to prove that 
life has no meaning, but merely that it has none discoverable by 
the methods of modern science. I will not even say that men of 
science themselves ^re not certain of its existence, and may not 
live by this certainty; but only that, if so, they are unaware 
whence this certainty comes, and that though their inner con- 
victions may claim our most sincere respect, their own analysis 
of them deserves our most contemptuous ridicule. 

If there is a soul in man, and if there is a God who has given this 
soul, the instinct of religion can never die ; but if there is any 
authentic explanation of the relations between the soul and God, 
and for some reason or other men in any way cease to accept this, 
their own explanations may well, by a gradual process, resolve 
themselves into a denial of the theory they seek to explain. And 
such, according to our men of science themselves, has been the 
case with the orthodox Christian faith, when once it began to be 
disintegrated by the solvent of Protestantism. The process is 
forcibly alluded to by Mr. Harrison. Traditional Protestantism 
dissolved into the nebulous tenets of the Broad Churchmen ; the 
tenets of the Broad Churchmen dissolved into Deism, Deism 
into Pantheism and the cultus of the Unknowable, and the last 
into Optimism. Mr. Harrison fails to read the lesson of history 
further, and to see that Optimism^ in its turn must yield to the 
solvent of criticism, and leave the religious instinct, or what is 
the same thing, a sense of a meaning in life, as a forlorn and 
bewildered emotion without any explanation of itself at all. 
What Optimism is at present must be abundantly evident. It is 
the last attempt to discover a peg on which to hang the fallen 
clothes of Christianity. As Mr. Harrison tells us, most of our 
scientific Optimists have been brought up with all the emotions 
of that faith. They have got rid of the faith, but the emotions 
have been left on their hands. They long for some object on 
which to lavish them, just as Don Quixote longed to find a lady- 
love ; and if we may jvidge from certain phrases of Mr. Harrison, 
they have modestly contented themselves with asking not that 



1 98 WILLIAM HURREL MALLOCK 

the object should be a truth, but merely that it should not, on 
the face of it, be a falsehood. He does not ask how well Human- 
ity deserves to be thought of, but how well he and his friends will 
be able to think of it. Once more let us say that this emotion 
which they call the love of Humanity is not an emotion I would 
ridicule. I only ridicule their bestowal of it. The love of Hu- 
manity, with no faith to enlighten it, and nothing to justify it 
beyond what science can show, is as absurd as the love of Titania 
lavished on Bottom; and the high priests of Humanity, with 
their solemn and pompous gravity, are like nothing so much as 
the Bumbles of a squabbling parish. We all know what Hobbes 
said to Catholicism, that it was the ghost of the dead Roman Em- 
pire, sitting enthroned on the ashes of it. Optimism, in the same 
way, is the ghost of Protestantism sitting on its ashes, not en- 
throned but gibbering. 

I hope that before long I may again return to this subject, to 
touch on many points which I have been unable to glance at now. 
On former occasions I have been asked by certain critics what pos- 
sible use, even suppose life is not worth much, I could hope to find 
in laying the fact bare. To the Optimists as men of science no 
explanation is needed. Every attempt to establish any truth, 
or even to establish any doubt, according to their principles is not 
only justifiable, but is a duty. To others, an explanation will 
not be very far to seek. If there is a meaning in life, we shall 
never imderstand it rightly till we have ceased to amuse our- 
selves with understanding it wrongly. Humanity, if there is 
any salvation for it, will never be saved till it sees that it cannot 
save itself, and asks in humility, seeking some greater power. 
Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? But as 
matters stand, it will never see this or ask this, till it has seen 
face to face the whole of its ghastly helplessness, and tasted — 
at least intellectually — the dregs of its degradation. When we 
have filled our bellies with the husks that swine eat, it may be 
that we shall arise and go. 






VIII 

DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 

Thomas Henry Huxley 

[The present essay by Huxley, published in the Westminster Review in 
April, i860, was one of the earliest reviews of Darwin's epoch-making work, 
The Origin of Species. Darwin's book is so stupendous an accumulation of 
scientific data that it needed at the time, and needs now for the casual stu- 
dent, an interpreter. Huxley fulfilled this function with great success for 
many years. This article, in fact, is only one of a large number of essays and 
addresses by Huxley which present the substance of Darwin's investigations 
in a popular, readily comprehensible light. Huxley's opposition to the advo- 
cates of the theory of special creation, who represented then in the main the 
conservative religious element, may seem unnecessarily harsh ; but it must 
be remembered that in that day the "battle-ground of religion and science" 
was emphatically real. Dogmatic churchmen of Huxley's time conceived 
science as nursing an antagonism that could be appeased only by the utter 
destruction of religious sentiment. That Huxley was mistakenly held to be 
an arch enemy of religion may be seen in his numerous temperate and open- 
minded writings on the relations of scientific and spiritual beliefs. 

This essay is a competent discussion of the principal points of the Dar- 
winian theory, although these points are presented with Huxley's character- 
istic caution. The fact is here emphasized that Darwin's hypothesis, like all 
hypotheses, can be accepted only tentatively, until supported by a convinc- 
ing mass of corroborative evidence. The scientific attitude of our day, 
however, holds, as Professor E. B. Wilson expresses it, that "biological in- 
vestigators have long since ceased to regard the fact of organic evolution as 
open to serious discussion."] 

Mr. Darwin's long-standing and well-earned scientific emi- 
nence probably renders him indifferent to that social notoriety 
which passes by the name of success ; but if the calm spirit of the 
philosopher have not yet wholly superseded the ambition and 
the vanity of the carnal man within him, he must be well satis- 
fied with the results of his venture in publishing the Origin of 

199 



200 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

Species. Overflowing the narrow bounds of purely scientific 
circles, the "species question" divides with Italy and the Volun- 
teers the attention of general society. Everybody has read Mr. 
Darwin's book, or, at least, has given an opinion upon its merits 
or demerits ; pietists, whether lay or ecclesiastic, decry it with 
the mild railing which sounds so charitable ; bigots denounce it 
with ignorant invective ; old ladies, of both sexes, consider it a 
decidedly dangerous book, and even savants, who have no better 
mud to throw, quote antiquated writers to show that its author 
is no better than an ape himself ; while every philosophical 
thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of 
liberalism; and all competent naturalists and physiologists, what- 
ever their opinions as to the ultimate fate of the doctrines put 
forth, acknowledge that the work in which they are embodied is 
a solid contribution to knowledge and inaugurates a new epoch 
in natural history. 

Nor has the discussion of the subject been restrained within 
the limits of conversation. When the public is eager and inter- 
ested, reviewers must minister to its wants ; and the genuine 
litterateur is too much in the habit of acquiring his knowledge 
from the book he judges — as the Abyssinian is said to pro\dde 
himself with steaks from the ox which carries him — to be with- 
held from criticism of a profound scientific work by the mere 
want of the requisite preliminary scientific acquirement ; while, 
on the other hand, the men of science who wish well to the new 
views, no less than those who dispute their validity, have natu- 
rally sought opportunities of expressing their opinions. Hence it 
is not surprising that almost all the critical journals have noticed 
Mr. Darwin's work at greater or less length; and so many dis- 
quisitions, of every degree of excellence, from the poor product of 
ignorance, too often stimulated by prejudice, to the fair and 
thoughtful essay of the candid student of nature, have appeared, 
that it seems an almost hopeless task to attempt to say anything 
new upon the question. 

But it may be doubted if the knowledge and acumen of pre- 
judged scientific opponents, or the subtlety of orthodox special 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 201 

pleaders, have yet exerted their full force in mystifying the real 
issues of the great controversy which has been set afoot, and 
whose end is hardly likely to be seen by this generation ; so that 
at this eleventh hour, and even failing anything new, it may be 
useful to state afresh that which is true, and to put the fundamen- 
tal positions advocated by Mr. Darwin in such a form that they 
may be grasped by those whose special studies lie in other direc- 
tions. And the adoption of this course may be the more ad- 
visable, because notwithstanding its great deserts, and indeed 
partly on account of them, the Origin of Species is by no means 
an easy book to read — if by reading is implied the full compre- 
hension of an author's meaning. 

We do not speak jestingly in saying that it is Mr. Darwin's 
misfortune to know more about the question he has taken up 
than any man living. Personally and practically exercised in 
zoology, in minute anatomy, in geology ; a student of geographi- 
cal distribution, not on maps and in museums only, but by long 
voyages and laborious collection ; having largely advanced each 
of these branches of science, and having spent many years in 
gathering and sifting materials for his present work, the store of 
accurately registered facts upon which the author of the Origin 
of Species is able to draw at will is prodigious. 

But this very superabundance of matter must have been em- 
barrassing to a writer who, for the present, can only put forward 
an abstract of his views; and thence it arises, perhaps, that not- 
withstanding the clearness of the style, those who attempt fairly 
to digest the book find much of it a sort of intellectual pemmican 
— a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than 
held together by the ordinary medium of an obvious logical 
bond : due attention will, without doubt, discover this bond, but 
it is often hard to find. 

Again, from sheer want of room, much has to be taken for 
granted which might readily enough be proved; and hence, while 
the adept, who can supply the missing links in the evidence from 
his own knowledge, discovers fresh proof of the singular thor- 
oughness with which all difficulties have been considered and all 



202 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

unjustifiable suppositions avoided, at every reperusal of Mr. 
Darwin's pregnant paragraphs, the novice in biology is apt to 
complain of the frequency of what he fancies is gratuitous 
assumption. 

Thus while it may be doubted if, for some years, any one is 
likely to be competent to pronounce judgment on all the issues 
raised by Mr. Darwin, there is assuredly abundant room for him, 
who, assuming the humbler, though perhaps as useful, office of an 
interpreter between the Origin of Species and the public, con- 
tents himself with endeavoring to point out the nature of the 
problems which it discusses ; to distinguish between the ascer- 
tained facts and the theoretical views which it contains ; and 
finally, to show the extent to which the explanation it offers satis- 
fies the requirements of scientific logic. At any rate, it is this 
office which we purpose to undertake in the following pages. 

It may be safely assumed that our readers have a general con- 
ception of the nature of the objects to which the word "species" 
is applied ; but it has, perhaps, occurred to a few, even to those 
who are naturalists ex professo, to reflect that, as commonly em- 
ployed, the term has a double sense and denotes two very differ- 
ent orders of relations. When we call a group of animals, or 
of plants, a species, we may imply thereby either that all these 
animals or plants have some common peculiarity of form or struc- 
ture; or we may mean that they possess some common func- 
tional character. That part of biological science which deals 
with form and structure is called Morphology — that which 
concerns itself with function. Physiology — so that we may con- 
veniently speak of these two senses or aspects of "species" — the 
one as morphological, the other as physiological. Regarded 
from the former point of view, a species is nothing more than a 
kind of animal or plant, which is distinctly definable from all 
others by certain constant and not merely sexual, morphological 
peculiarities. Thus horses form a species, because the group of 
animals to which that name is applied is distinguished from all 
others in the world by the following constantly associated 
characters. They have (i) A vertebral column; (2) Mammae; 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 203 

(3) A placental embryo ; (4) Four legs ; (5) A single well-devel- 
oped toe in each foot provided with a hoof ; (6) A bushy tail ; and 
(7) Callosities on the inner sides of both the fore and the hind 
legs. The asses, again, form a distinct species, because, with the 
same characters, as far as the fifth in the above list, all asses have 
tufted tails, and have callosities only on the inner side of the fore 
legs. If animals were discovered having the general characters 
of the horse, but sometimes with callosities only on the fore legs, 
and more or less tufted tails ; or animals having the general 
characters of the ass, but with more or less bushy tails, and some- 
times with callosities on both pairs of legs, besides being inter- 
mediate in other respects — the two species would have to be 
merged into one. They could no longer be regarded as mor- 
phologically distinct species, for they would not be distinctly 
definable one from the other. 

However bare and simple this definition of species may appear 
to be, we confidently appeal to all practical naturalists, whether 
zoologists, botanists, or paleontologists, to say if, in the vast 
majority of cases, they know, or mean to affirm, anything more 
of the group of animals or plants they so denominate than what 
has just been stated. Even the most decided advocates of the 
received doctrines respecting species admit this. 

"I apprehend," says Professor Owen,^ "that few naturalists 
nowadays, in describing and proposing a name for what they 
call 'a new species,'' use that term to signify what was meant by 
it twenty or thirty years ago ; that is, an originally distinct crea- 
tion, maintaining its primitive distinction by obstructive genera- 
tive peculiarities. The proposer of the new species now intends 
to state no more than he actually knows ; as for example, tha^ 
the differences on which he founds the specific character are con- 
stant in individuals of both sexes, so far as observation has 
reached ; and that they are not due to domestication or to arti- 
ficially superinduced external circumstances, or to any outward 

' "On the Osteology of the Chimpanzees and Orangs," Transactions of the 
Zoological Society, 1858. 



204 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

influence within his cognizance; that the species is wild, or is 
such as it appears by nature." 

If we consider, in fact, that by far the largest proportion of re- 
corded existing species are known only by the study of their skins, 
or bones, or other lifeless exuvia; that we are acquainted with 
none, or next to none, of their physiological peculiarities be- 
yond those which can be deduced from their structure, or are 
open to cursory observation ; and that we cannot hope to learn 
more of any of those extinct forms of life which now constitute no 
inconsiderable proportion of the known Flora and Fauna of the 
world ; it is obvious that the definitions of these species can be only 
of a purely structural or morphological character. It is probable 
that naturalists would have avoided much confusion of ideas if 
they had more frequently borne these necessary limitations of 
our knowledge in mind. But while it may safely be admitted 
that we are acquainted with only the morphological characters 
of the vast majority of species, the functional or physiological 
pecuharities of a few have been carefully investigated, and the 
result of that study forms a large and most interesting portion of 
the physiology of reproduction. 

The student of nature wonders the more and is astonished the 
less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations ; but 
of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps 
the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of 
an animal from its embryo. Examine the recently laid egg of 
some common animal, such as a salamander or a newt. It is a 
minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing 
but a structureless sac, inclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules 
in suspension. But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi- 
fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery 
cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid and 
yet so steady and purpose-like in their succession, that one 
can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeler 
upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the 
mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions. 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 205 

until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to 
build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, 
then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied 
by the spinal column, and molded the contour of the body; 
pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fash- 
ioning flank and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so 
artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one 
is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more 
subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden 
artist, with his plan before him, striving with skillful manipula- 
tion to perfect his work. 

As life advances, and the young amphibian ranges the waters, 
the terror of his insect contemporaries, not only are the nutri- 
tious particles supplied by its prey, by the addition of which to 
its frame growth takes place, laid down, each in its proper spot, 
and in such due proportion to the rest, as to reproduce the form, 
the color, and the size, characteristic of the parental stock ; but 
even the wonderful powers of reproducing lost parts possessed by 
these animals are controlled by the same governing tendency. 
Cut off the legs, the tail, the jaws, separately or all together, and, 
as Spallanzani showed long ago, these parts not only grow again, 
but the redintegrated limb is formed on the same type as those 
which were lost. The new jaw or leg is a newt's, and never by 
any accident more like that of a frog. What is true of the newt is 
true of every animal and of every plant ; the acorn tends to build 
itself up again into a woodland giant such as that from whose 
twig it fell ; the spore of the humblest lichen reproduces the green 
or brown incrustation which gave it birth ; and at the other end of 
the scale of life, the child that resembles neither the paternal nor the 
maternal side of the house would be regarded as a kind of monster. 

So that the one end to which in all living beings the formative 
impulse is tending — the one scheme which the Archaeus of the 
old speculators strives to carry out — seems to be to mold the 
offspring into the likeness of the parent. It is the first great law 
of reproduction, that the offspring tends to resemble its parent 
or parents, more closely than anything else. 



2o6 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

Science will some day show us how this law is a necessary con- 
sequence of the more general laws which govern matter ; but for 
the present, more can hardly be said than that it appears to be 
in harmony with them. We know that the phenomena of vitality 
are not something apart from other physical phenomena, but 
one with them ; and matter and force are the two names of the 
one artist who fashions the living as well as the lifeless. Hence, 
living bodies should obey the same great laws as other matter — 
nor, throughout nature, is there a law of wider application than 
this, that a body impelled by two forces takes the direction of 
their resultant. But living bodies may be regarded as nothing 
but extremely complex bundles of forces held in a mass of matter, 
as the complex forces of a magnet are held in the steel by its 
coercive force ; and since the differences of sex are comparatively 
slight, or, in other words, the sum of the forces in each has a very 
similar tendency, their resultant, the offspring, may reasonably 
be expected to deviate but little from a course parallel to either, 
or to both. 

Represent the reason of the law to ourselves by what physical 
metaphor or analogy we will, however, the great matter is to 
apprehend its existence and the importance of the consequences 
deducible from it. For things which are like to the same are like 
to one another, and if, in a great series of generations, every off- 
spring is like its parent, it follows that all the offspring and all the 
parents must be like one another; and that, given an original 
parental stock with the opportunity of undisturbed multiplica- 
tion, the law in question necessitates the production, in course of 
time, of an indefinitely large group, the whole of whose members 
are at once very similar and are blood relations, having descended 
from the same parent, or pair of parents. The proof that all the 
members of any given group of animals, or plants, had thus de- 
scended would be ordinarily considered sufficient to entitle them 
to the rank of physiological species, for most physiologists con- 
sider species to be definable as " the offspring of a single primitive 
stock." 

But though it is quite true that all those groups we call species 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 207 

may, according to the known laws of reproduction, have de- 
scended from a single stock, and though it is very likely they 
really have done so, yet this conclusion rests on deduction and 
can hardly hope to establish itself upon a basis of observation. 
And the primitiveness of the supposed single stock, which, after 
all, is the essential part of the matter, is not only a hypothesis, 
but one which has not a shadow of foundation, if by "primitive" 
be meant "independent of any other living being." A scientific 
definition, of which an unwarrantable hypothesis forms an essen- 
tial part, carries its condemnation within itself ; but even sup- 
posing such a definition were, in form, tenable, the physiologist 
who should attempt to apply it in nature would soon find him- 
self involved in great, if not inextricable difficulties. As we have 
said, it is indubitable that offspring tend to resemble the parental 
organism, but it is equally true that the similarity attained never 
amounts to identity, either in form or in structure. There is al- 
ways a certain amount of deviation, not only from the precise 
characters of a single parent, but when, as in most animals and 
many plants, the sexes are lodged in distinct individuals, from 
an exact mean between the two parents. And, indeed, on gen- 
eral principles, this slight deviation seems as intelligible as the 
general similarity, if we reflect how complex the cooperating 
"bundles of forces" are, and how improbable it is that, in any 
case, their true resultant shall coincide with any mean between 
the more obvious characters of the two parents. Whatever be 
its cause, however, the coexistence of this tendency to minor 
variation with the tendency to general similarity is of vast im- 
portance in its bearing on the question of the origin of species. 

As a general rule, the extent to which an offspring differs from 
its parent is slight enough ; but, occasionally, the amount of 
difference is much more strongly marked, and then the divergent 
offspring receives the name of a Variety. Multitudes, of what 
there is every reason to believe are such varieties, are known, but 
the origin of very few has been accurately recorded, and of these 
we will select two as more especially illustrative of the main fea- 
tures of variation. The first of them is that of the " Ancon," or 



2o8 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

"Otter" sheep, of which a careful account is given by Colonel 
David Humphreys, F.R.S., in a letter to Sir Joseph Banks, pub- 
lished in the Philosophical Transactions for 1813. It appears 
that one Seth Wright, the proprietor of a farm on the banks of 
the Charles River, in Massachusetts, possessed a flock of fifteen 
ewes and a ram of the ordinary kind. In the year 1791 one of 
the ewes presented her owner with a male lamb, differing, for no 
assignable reason, from its parents by a proportionally long body 
and short bandy legs, whence it was unable to emulate its rela- 
tives in those sportive leaps over the neighbors' fences, in which 
they were in the habit of indulging, much to the good farmer's 
vexation. 

The second case is that detailed by a no less unexceptionable 
authority than Reaumur, in his Art de faire eclore les Poulets. 
A Maltese couple, named Kelleia, whose hands and feet were con- 
structed upon the ordinary human model, had born to them a son, 
Gratio, who possessed six perfectly movable fingers on each hand 
and six toes, not quite so well formed, on each foot. No cause 
could be assigned for the appearance of this unusual variety of 
the human species. 

Two circumstances are well worthy of remark in both these 
cases. In each, the variety appears to have arisen in full force, 
and, as it were, per saltum^ ; a wide and definite difference ap- 
pearing, at once, between the Ancon ram and the ordinary sheep ; 
between the six-fingered and six-toed Gratio Kelleia and ordinary 
men. In neither case is it possible to point out any obvious 
reason for the appearance of the variety. Doubtless there were 
determining causes for these, as for all other phenomena ; but 
they do not appear, and we can be tolerably certain that what are 
ordinarily understood as changes in physical conditions, as in 
climate, in food, or the like, did not take place and had nothing 
to do with the matter. It was no case of what is commonly called 
adaptation to circumstances ; but, to use a conveniently erro- 
neous phrase, the variations arose spontaneously. The fruitless 
search after final causes leads their pursuers a long way; but 
1 At a jump. — Editors. 



I 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 209 

even those hardy teleologists, who are ready to break through all 
the laws of physics in chase of their favorite will-o'-the-wisp, may 
be puzzled to discover what purpose could be attained by the 
stunted legs of Seth Wright's ram or the hexadactyl members of 
Gratio Kelleia. 

Varieties then arise we know not why ; and it is more than prob- 
able that the majority of varieties have arisen in the spontaneous 
manner, though we are, of course, far from denying that they 
may be traced, in some cases, to distinct external influences 
which are assuredly competent to alter the character of the tegu- 
mentary covering, to change color, to increase or diminish the 
size of muscles, to modify constitution, and, among plants, to 
give rise to the metamorphosis of stamens into petals, and so 
forth. But however they may have arisen, what especially in- 
terests us at present is to remark that, once in existence, varieties 
obey the fundamental law of reproduction that like tends to 
produce like, and their offspring exemplify it by tending to ex- 
hibit the same deviation from the parental stock as themselves. 
Indeed, there seems to be, in many instances, a prepotent influ- 
ence about a newly arisen variety which gives it what one may 
call an unfair advantage over the normal descendants from the 
same stock. This is strikingly exemplified by the case of Gratio 
Kelleia, who married a woman with the ordinary pentadactyl ex- 
tremities, and had by her four children, Salvator, George, Andre, 
and Marie. Of these children Salvator, the eldest boy, had six 
fingers and six toes, like his father; the second and third, also boys, 
had five fingers and five toes, like their mother, though the hands 
and feet of George were slightly deformed ; the last, a girl, had 
five fingers and five toes, but the thumbs were slightly deformed. 
The variety thus reproduced itself purely in the eldest, while the 
normal type reproduced itself purely in the third, and almost 
purely in the second and last : so that it would seem, at first, as 
if the normal type were more powerful than the variety. But all 
these children grew up and intermarried with normal wives and 
husbands, and then, note what took place : Salvator had four 
children, three of whom exhibited the hexadactyl members of 



2IO THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

their grandfather and father, while the youngest had the penta- 
dactyl limbs of the mother and grandmother ; so that here, not- 
withstanding a double pentadactyl dilution of the blood, the 
hexadactyl variety had the best of it. The same prepotency 
of the variety was still more markedly exemplified in the progeny 
of two of the other children, Marie and George. Marie (whose 
thumbs only were deformed) gave birth to a boy with six toes, 
and three other normally formed children ; but George, who was 
not quite so pure a pentadactyl, begot, first, two girls, each of 
whom had six fingers and toes ; then a girl with six fingers on 
each hand and six toes on the right foot, but only five toes on the 
left ; and lastly, a boy with only five fingers and toes. In the^e 
instances, therefore, the variety, as it were, leaped over one gen- 
eration to reproduce itself in full force in the next. Finally, the 
purely pentadactyl Andre was the father of many children, not 
one of whom departed from the normal parental type. 

If a variation which approaches the nature of a monstrosity 
can strive thus forcibly to reproduce itself, it is not wonderful 
that less aberrant modifications should tend to be preserved even 
more strongly ; and the history of the Ancon sheep is, in this re- 
spect, particularly instructive. With the "cuteness" charac- 
teristic of their nation, the neighbors of the Massachusetts 
farmer imagined it would be an excellent thing if all his sheep 
were imbued with the stay-at-home tendencies enforced by na- 
ture upon the newly arrived ram ; and they advised Wright to 
kill the old patriarch of his fold, and install the Ancon ram in his 
place. The result justified their sagacious anticipations, and 
coincided very nearly with what occurred to the progeny of 
Gratio Kelleia. The young lambs were almost always either pure 
Ancons or pure ordinary sheep. But when sufficient Ancon 
sheep were obtained to interbreed with one another, it was found 
that the offspring was always pure Ancon. Colonel Humphreys, 
in fact, states that he was acquainted with only "one question- 
able case of a contrary nature." Here, then, is a remarkable and 
well-established instance, not only of a very distinct race being 
established per saltmn, but of that race breeding "true" at once, 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 211 

and showing no mixed forms, even when crossed with another 
breed. 

By taking care to select Ancons of both sexes for breeding 
from, it thus became easy to establish an extremely well-marked 
race, so peculiar that even when herded with other sheep, it was 
noted that the Ancons kept together. And there is every reason 
to believe that the existence of this breed might have been in- 
definitely protracted ; but the introduction of the Merino sheep, 
which were not only very superior to the Ancons in wool and 
meat, but quite as quiet and orderly, led to the complete neglect 
of the new breed, so that, in 1813, Colonel Humphreys found it 
difl5cult to obtain the specimen whose skeleton was presented to 
Sir Joseph Banks. We believe that for many years no remnant 
of it has existed in the United States. 

Gratio Kelleia was not the progenitor of a race of six-fingered 
men, as Seth Wright's ram became a nation of Ancon sheep, 
though the tendency of the variety to perpetuate itself appears to 
have been fully as strong in the one case as in the other. And 
the reason of the difference is not far to seek. Seth Wright took 
care not to weaken the Ancon blood by matching his Ancon 
ewes with any but males of the same variety, while Gratio 
Kelleia's sons were too far removed from the patriarchal times to 
intermarry with their sisters ; and his grandchildren seem not to 
have been attracted by their six-fingered cousins. In other 
words, in the one example a race was produced, because, for sev- 
eral generations, care was taken to select both parents of the breed- 
ing stock from animals exhibiting a tendency to vary in the 
same direction ; while in the other no race was evolved, because 
no such selection was exercised. A race is a propagated variety, 
and as, by the laws of reproduction, offspring tend to assume 
the parental forms, they will be more likely to propagate a 
variation exhibited by both parents than that possessed by only 
one. 

There is no organ of the body of an animal which may not, and 
does not, occasionally, vary more or less from the normal type ; 
and there is no variation which may not be transmitted, and 



212 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

which, if selectively transmitted, may not become the founda- 
tion of a race. This great truth, sometimes forgotten by phi- 
losophers, has long been familiar to practical agriculturists and 
breeders; and upon it rest all the methods of improving the 
breeds of domestic animals, which for the last century have been 
followed with so much success in England. Color, form, size, 
texture of hair or wool, proportions of various parts, strength 
or weakness of constitution, tendency to fatten or to remain lean, 
to give much or little milk, speed, strength, temper, intelligence, 
special instincts ; there is not one of these characters whose trans- 
mission is not an everyday occurrence within the experience of 
cattle breeders, stock farmers, horse dealers, and dog and poultry 
fanciers. Nay, it is only the other day that an eminent physiol- 
ogist. Dr. Brown Sequard, communicated to the Royal Society 
his discovery that epilepsy, artificially produced in guinea pigs, 
by a means which he has discovered, is transmitted to their off- 
spring. 

But a race, once produced, is no more a fixed and immutable 
entity than the stock whence it sprang ; variations arise among 
its members, and as these variations are transmitted like any 
others, new races may be developed out of the preexisting one 
ad infinitum, or, at least, within any limit at present determined. 
Given sufficient time and sufficiently careful selection, and the 
multitude of races which may arise from a common stock is as 
astonishing as are the extreme structural differences which they 
may present. A remarkable example of this is to be found in 
the rock pigeon, which Mr. Darwin has, in our opinion, satis- 
factorily demonstrated to be the progenitor of all our domestic 
pigeons, of which there are certainly more than a hundred well- 
marked races. The most noteworthy of these races are the four 
great stocks known to the "fancy" as tumblers, pouters ^ carriers, 
and f antails — birds which not only differ most singularly in size, 
color, and habits, but in the form of the beak and of the skull ; in 
the proportions of the beak to the skull ; in the number of tail- 
feathers; in the absolute and relative size of the feet; in the 
presence or absence of the uropygial gland; in the number of 






L 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 213 

vertebrae in the back ; in short, in precisely those characters 
in which the genera and species of birds differ from one 
another. 

And it is most remarkable and instructive to observe that 
none of these races can be shown to have been originated by the 
action of changes in what are commonly called external circum- 
stances, upon the wild rock pigeon. On the contrary, from time 
immemorial, pigeon fanciers have had essentially similar methods 
of treating their pets, which have been housed, fed, protected, and 
cared for in much the same way in all pigeonries. In fact, there 
is no case better adapted than that of the pigeons to refute the 
doctrine which one sees put forth on high authority, that "no 
other characters than those founded on the development of bone 
for the attachment of muscles " are capable ,of variation. In pre- 
cise contradiction of this hasty assertion, Mr. Darwin's re- 
searches prove that the skeleton of the wings in domestic pigeons 
has hardly varied at all from that of the wild type ; while, on the 
other hand, it is in exactly those respects, such as the relative 
length of the beak and skull, the number of the vertebrae, and 
the number of the tail-feathers, in which muscular exertion can 
have no important influence, that the utmost amount of varia- 
tion has taken place. 

We have said that the following out of the properties exhibited 
by physiological species would lead us into difficulties, and at 
this point they begin to be obvious ; for if, as a result of spon- 
taneous variation and of selective breeding, the progeny of a 
common stock may become separated into groups distinguished 
from one another by constant, not sexual, morphological charac- 
ters, it is clear that the physiological definition of species is likely 
to clash with the morphological definition. No one would hesi- 
tate to describe the pouter and the tumbler as distinct species, 
if they were found fossil, or if their skins and skeletons were 
imported, as those of exotic wild birds commonly are; and, 
without doubt, if considered alone, they are good and distinct 
morphological species. On the other hand, they are not physi- 



214 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

ological species, for they are descended from a common stock, 
the rock pigeon. 

Under these circumstances, as it is admitted on all sides that 
races occur in nature, how are we to know whether any appar- 
ently distinct animals are really of different physiological species, 
or not, seeing that the amount of morphological difference is no 
safe guide ? Is there any test of a physiological species ? The 
usual answer of physiologists is in the affirmative. It is said 
that such a test is to be found in the phenomena of hybridization 
— in the results of crossing races, as compared with the results of 
crossing species. 

So far as the evidence goes at present, individuals, of what are 
certainly known to be mere races produced by selection, however 
distinct they may appear to be, not only breed freely together, 
but the offspring of such crossed races are also perfectly fertile 
with one another. Thus, the spaniel and the greyhound, the 
dray horse and the Arab, the pouter and the tumbler, breed to- 
gether with perfect freedom, and their mongrels, if matched with 
other mongrels of the same kind, are equally fertile. 

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the individuals 
of many natural species are either absolutely infertile, if crossed 
with individuals of other species, or, if they give rise to hybrid 
offspring, the hybrids so produced are infertile when paired to- 
gether. The horse and the ass, for instance, if so crossed, give rise 
to the mule, and there is no certain evidence of offspring ever 
having been produced by a male and female mule. The unions 
of the rock pigeon and the ring pigeon appear to be equally 
barren of result. Here, then, says the physiologist, we have a 
means of distinguishing any two true species from any two varie- 
ties. If a male and a female, selected from each group, produce 
oifspring, and that offspring is fertile with others produced in the 
same way, the groups are races and not species. If, on the other 
hand, no result ensues, or if the offspring are infertile with others 
produced in the same way, they are true physiological species. 
The test would be an admirable one, if, in the first place, it were 
always practicable to apply it, and if, in the second, it always 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 215 

yielded results susceptible of a definite interpretation. Unfortu- 
nately, in the great majority of cases, this touchstone for species 
is wholly inapplicable. 

The constitution of many wild animals is so altered by confine- 
ment that they will not even breed with their own females, so 
that the negative results obtained from crosses are of no value, 
and the antipathy of wild animals of different species for one 
another, or even of wild and tame members of the same species, 
is ordinarily so great that it is hopeless to look for such unions in 
nature. The hermaphrodism of most plants, the difficulty in the 
way of ensuring the absence of their own, or the proper working 
of other pollen, are obstacles of no less magnitude in applying the 
test to them. And in both animals and plants is superadded the 
further difficulty, that experiments must be continued over a long 
time for the purpose of ascertaining the fertility of the mongrel 
or hybrid progeny, as well as of the first crosses from which they 
spring. 

Not only do these great practical difficulties lie in the way of 
applying the hybridization test, but even when this oracle can 
be questioned, its replies are sometimes as doubtful as those of 
Delphi. For example, cases are cited by Mr. Darwin, of plants 
which are more fertile with the pollen of another species than with 
their own ; and there are others, such as certain /z^c/, whose male 
element will fertilize the ovule of a plant of distinct species, while 
the males of the latter species are ineffective with the females of 
the first. So that, in the last-named instance, a physiologist 
who should cross the two species in one way, would decide that 
they were true species ; while another, who should cross them in 
the reverse way, would, with equal justice, according to the rule, 
pronounce them to be mere races. Several plants, which there 
is great reason to believe are mere varieties, are almost sterile 
when crossed; while both animals and plants, which have al- 
ways been regarded by naturalists as of distinct species, turn out, 
when the test is applied, to be perfectly fertile. Again, the sterility 
or fertility of crosses seems to bear no relation to the structural 
resemblances or differences of the members of any two groups. 



2i6 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

Mr. Darwin has discussed this question with singular ability 
and circumspection, and his conclusions are summed up as 
follows, at page 276 of his work : — 

"First crosses between forms sufficiently distinct to be ranked 
as species, and their hybrids, are very generally, but not uni- 
versally, sterile. The sterility is of all degrees, and is often so 
slight that the two most careful experimentalists who have ever 
lived have come to diametrically opposite conclusions in rank- 
ing forms by this test. The sterility is innately variable in in- 
dividuals of the same species, and is eminently susceptible of 
favorable and unfavorable conditions. The degree of sterility 
does not strictly follow systematic affinity, but is governed by 
several curious and complex laws. It is generally different, and 
sometimes widely different, in reciprocal crosses between the 
same two species. It is not always equal in degree in a first 
cross, and in the hybrid produced from this cross. 

"In the same manner as in grafting trees, the capacity of one 
species or variety to take on another is incidental on generally 
unknown differences in their vegetative systems; so in crossing, 
the greater or less facility of one species to unite with another is 
incidental on unknown differences in their reproductive systems. 
There is no more reason to think that species have been specially 
endowed with various degrees of sterility to prevent them cross- 
ing and breeding in nature, than to think that trees have been 
specially endowed with various and somewhat analogous degrees 
of difiiculty in being grafted together, in order to prevent them 
becoming inarched in our forests. 

" The sterility of first crosses between pure species, which hav€ 
their reproductive systems perfect, seems to depend on several 
circumstances ; in some cases largely on the early death of the 
embryo. The sterility of hybrids which have their reproductive 
systems imperfect, and which have had this system and their 
whole organization disturbed by being compounded of two dis- 
tinct species, seems closely allied to that sterility which so fre- 
quently affects pure species when their natural conditions of life 
have been disturbed. This view is supported by a parallelism 



I 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 217 

of another kind ; namely, that the crossing of forms only slightly 
different is favorable to the vigor and fertility of the offspring ; 
and that slight changes in the conditions of life are apparently 
favorable to the vigor and fertility of all organic beings. It is 
not surprising that the degree of difficulty in uniting two species, 
and the degree of sterility of their hybrid offspring should gener- 
ally correspond, though due to distinct causes ; for both depend 
on the amount of difference of some kind between the species 
which are crossed. Nor is it surprising that the facility of effect- 
ing a first cross, the fertility of hybrids produced from it, and the 
capacity of being grafted together — though this latter capacity 
evidently depends on widely different circumstances — should all 
run to a certain extent parallel with the systematic affinity of the 
forms which are subjected to experiment ; for systematic affinity 
attempts to express all kinds of resemblance between all species. 

" First crosses between forms known to be varieties, or suffi- 
ciently alike to be considered as varieties, and their mongrel 
offspring, are very generally, but not quite universally, fertile. 
Nor is this nearly general and perfect fertility surprising, when 
we remember how liable we are to argue in a circle with respect 
to varieties in a state of nature ; and when we remember that 
the greater number of varieties have been produced under do- 
mestication by the selection of mere external differences, and 
not of differences in the reproductive system. In all other re- 
spects, excluding fertility, there is a close general resemblance 
between hybrids and mongrels." 

We fully agree with the general tenor of this weighty passage, 
but forcible as are these arguments, and little as the value of 
fertility or infertility as a test of species may be, it must not be 
forgotten that the really important fact, so far as the inquiry 
into the origin of species goes, is, that there are such things in 
nature as groups of animals and of plants, whose members are 
incapable of fertile union with those of other groups ; and that 
there are such things as hybrids, which are absolutely sterile when 
crossed with other hybrids. For if such phenomena as these 
were exhibited by only two of those assemblages of living objects, 



2i8 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

to which the name of species (whether it be used in its physio- 
logical or in its morphological sense) is given, it would have to be 
accounted for by any theory of the origin of species, and every 
theory which could not account for it would be, so far, imperfect. 

Up to this point we have been dealing with matters of fact, 
and the statements which we have laid before the reader would, 
to the best of our knowledge, be admitted to contain a fair expo- 
sition of what is at present known respecting the essential prop- 
erties of species, by all who have studied the question. And 
whatever may be his theoretical views, no naturalist will prob- 
ably be disposed to demur to the following summary of that 
exposition : — 

Living beings, whether animals or plants, are divisible into 
multitudes of distinctly definable kinds, which are morphological 
species. They are also divisible into groups of individuals, which 
breed freely together, tending to reproduce their like, and are 
physiological species. Normally, resembling their parents, the 
offspring of members of these species are still liable to vary, and 
the variation may be perpetuated by selection, as a race, which 
race, in many cases, presents all the characteristics of a morpho- 
logical species. But it is not as yet proved that a race ever 
exhibits, when crossed with another race of the same species, 
those phenomena of hybridization which are exhibited by many 
species when crossed with other species. On the other hand, 
not only is it not proved that all species give rise to hybrids in- 
fertile inter se, but there is much reason to believe that, in cross- 
ing, species exhibit every gradation from perfect sterility to per- 
fect fertility. 

Such are the most essential characteristics of species. Even 
were man not one of them — a member of the same system and 
subject to the same laws — the question of theii- origin, their 
causal connection, that is, with the other phenomena of the 
universe, must have attracted his attention, as soon as his intelli- 
gence had raised itself above the level of his daily wants. 

Indeed, history relates that such was the case, and has em- 
balmed for us the speculations upon the origin of living beings,. 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 219 

which were among the earliest products of the dawning intellec- 
tual activity of man. In those early days positive knowledge 
was not to be had, but the craving after it needed, at all hazards, 
to be satisfied, and according to the country, or the turn of 
thought of the speculator, the suggestion that all living things 
arose from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from 
some more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient rest- 
ing place for his curiosity. The myths of Paganism are as dead 
as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in oppo- 
sition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to 
scorn ; but the coeval imaginations current among the rude 
inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very name 
and age are admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have un- 
fortunately not yet shared their fate, but, even at this day, are 
regarded by nine tenths of the civilized world as the authorita- 
tive standard of fact and the criterion of the justice of scientific 
conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things, and, among 
them, of species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of 
modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semibarbarous 
Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium 
of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest 
seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose 
lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the 
mistaken zeal of bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of 
weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort 
to harmonize impossibilities — whose life has been wasted in the 
attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old 
bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong 
party ? 

It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been 
amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle 
of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules ; 
and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy 
have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire 
from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated ; scotched, 
if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of 



220 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

thought. It learns not, neither can it forget ; and though at 
present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to 
insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning 
and the end of sound science, and to visit with such petty thun- 
derbolts as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl, those who refuse 
to degrade nature to the level of primitive Judaism. 

Philosophers, on the other hand, have no such aggressive ten- 
dencies. With eyes fixed on the noble goal to which per as per a 
et ardua ^ they tend, they may, now and then, be stirred to 
momentary wrath by the unnecessary obstacles with which the 
ignorant or the malicious encumber, if they cannot bar, the 
difficult path ; but why should their souls be deeply vexed ? 
The majesty of Fact is on their side, and the elemental forms of 
nature are working for them. Not a star comes to the meridian 
at its calculated time but testifies to the justice of their methods 
— their beliefs are "one with the falling rain and with the grow- 
ing corn." By doubt they are established, and open inquiry is 
their bosom friend. Such men have no fear of traditions, however 
venerable, and no respect for them when they become mischiev- 
ous and obstructive ; but they have better than mere antiquarian 
business in hand, and if dogmas, which ought to be fossil but are 
not, are not forced upon their notice, they are too happy to treat 
them as nonexistent. 

The hypotheses respecting the origin of species which profess 
to stand upon a scientific basis, and, as such, alone demand 
serious attention, are of two kinds. The one, the "special crea- 
tion" hypothesis, presumes every species to have originated 
from one or more stocks, these not being the result of the modi- 
fication of any other form of living matter — or arising by natu- 
ral agencies — but being produced, as such, by a supernatural 
creative act. 

The other, the so-called "transmutation" hypothesis, con- 
siders that all existing species are the result of the modification of 
preexisting species and those of their predecessors, by agencies 
^ By rough and steep paths. — Editors. 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 221 

similar to those which at the present day produce varieties and 
races, and therefore in an altogether natural way ; and it is a 
probable, though not a necessary consequence of this hypothesis, 
that all living beings have arisen from a single stock. With 
respect to the origin of this primitive stock or stocks, the doc- 
trine of the origin of species is obviously not necessarily concerned. 
The transmutation hypothesis, for example, is perfectly consist- 
ent either with the conception of a special creation of the primi- 
tive germ, or with the supposition of its having arisen, as a modi- 
fication of inorganic matter, by natural causes. 

The doctrine of special creation owes its existence very largely 
to the supposed necessity of making science accord with the 
Hebrew cosmogony; but it is curious to observe that, as the 
doctrine is at present maintained by men of science, it is as hope- 
lessly inconsistent with the Hebrew view as any other (hypothesis. 

If there be any result which has come more clearly out of geo- 
logical investigation than another, it is, that the vast series of 
extinct animals and plants is not divisible, as it was once sup- 
posed to be, into distinct groups, separated by sharply marked 
boundaries. There are no great gulfs between epochs and forma- 
tions — no successive periods marked by the appearance of 
plants, of water animals, and of land animals, en masse. Every 
year adds to the list of links between what the older geologists 
supposed to be widely separated epochs : witness the crags 
linking the Drift with the older Tertiaries ; the Maestricht beds 
linking the Tertiaries with the Chalk ; the St. Cassian beds ex- 
hibiting an abundant fauna of mixed Mesozoic and Paleozoic 
types, in rocks of an epoch once supposed to be eminently poor 
in life ; witness, lastly, the incessant disputes as to whether a 
given stratum shall be reckoned Devonian or Carboniferous, Si- 
lurian or Devonian, Cambrian or Silurian. 

This truth is further illustrated in a most interesting manner 
by the impartial and highly competent testimony of M. Pictet, 
from whose calculations of what percentage of the genera of 
animals existing in any formation lived during the preceding 
formation, it results that in no case is the proportion less than 



2 22 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

one third, or ^t, per cent. It is the Triassic formation, or the 
commencement of the Mesozoic epoch, which has received this 
smallest inheritance from preceding ages. The other formations 
not uncommonly exhibit 60, 80, or even 94 per cent of genera in 
common with those whose remains are embedded in their prede- 
cessor. Not only is this true, but the subdivisions of each forma- 
tion exhibit new species characteristic of, and found only in, 
them ; and in many cases, as in the Lias, for example, the separate 
beds of these subdivisions are distinguished by well-marked and 
peculiar forms of life. A section a hundred feet thick will ex- 
hibit at different heights a dozen species of ammonite, none of 
which passes beyond its particular zone of limestone or clay 
into the zone below it or into that above it ; so that those who 
adopt the doctrine of special creation must be prepared to admit, 
that at intervals of time, corresponding with the thickness of 
these beds, the Creator thought fit to interfere with the natural 
course of events for the purpose of making a new ammonite. 
It is not easy to transplant one's self into the frame of mind of 
those who can accept such a conclusion as this, on any evidence 
short of absolute demonstration ; and it is difficult to see what 
is to be gained by so doing, since, as we have said, it is obvious 
that such a view of the origin of living beings is utterly opposed 
to the Hebrew cosmogony. Deserving no aid from the powerful 
arm of bibliolatry, then, does the received form of the hypothesis 
of special creation derive any support from science or sound 
logic ? Assuredly not much. The arguments brought forward 
in its favor all take one form : If species were not supernaturally 
created, we cannot understand the facts x, or y, or z; we cannot 
understand the structure of animals or plants, unless we suppose 
they were contrived for special ends ; we cannot understand the 
structure of the eye, except by supposing it to have been made 
to see with ; we cannot understand instincts, unless we suppose 
animals to have been miraculously endowed with them. 

As a question of dialectics, it must be admitted that this sort 
of reasoning is not very formidable to those who are not to be 
frightened by consequences. It is an argumentum ad ignoran- 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 223 

tiam — take this explanation or be ignorant. But suppose we 
prefer to admit our ignorance rather than adopt a hypothesis at 
variance with all the teachings of nature ? Or suppose for a 
moment we admit the explanation, and then seriously ask our- 
selves how much the wiser are we ? what does the explanation 
explain ? Is it any more than a grandiloquent way of announc- 
ing the fact that we really know nothing about the matter ? A 
phenomenon is explained when it is shown to be a case of some 
general law of nature ; but the supernatural interposition of the 
Creator can by the nature of the case exemplify no law, and if 
species have really arisen in this way, it is absurd to attempt to 
discuss their origin. 

Or, lastly, let us ask ourselves whether any amount of evi- 
dence which the nature of our faculties permits us to attain, can 
justify us in asserting that any phenomenon is out of the reach of 
natural causation. To this end it is obviously necessary that we 
should know all the consequences to which all possible combina- 
tions, continued through unlimited time, can give rise. If we 
knew these, and found none competent to originate species, we 
should have good ground for denying their origin by natural 
causation. Till we know them, any hypothesis is better than 
one which involves us in such miserable presumption. 

But the hypothesis of special creation is not only a mere 
specious mask for our ignorance ; its existence in Biology marks 
the youth and imperfection of the science. For what is the his- 
tory of every science but the history of the elimination of the 
notion of creative, or other interferences, with the natural order 
of the phenomena which are the subject matter of that science ? 
When Astronomy was young, " the morning stars sang together 
for joy," and the planets were guided in their courses by celestial 
hands. Now, the harmony of the stars has resolved itself into 
gravitation according to the inverse squares of the distances, and 
the orbits of the planets are deducible from the laws of the forces 
which allow a schoolboy's stone to break a window. The Hght- 
ning was the angel of the Lord ; but it has pleased Providence, 
in these modern times, that science should make it the humble 



224 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

messenger of man, and we know that every flash that shimmers 
about the horizon on a summer's evening is determined by ascer- 
tainable conditions, and that its direction and brightness might, 
if our knowledge of these were great enough, have been calcu- 
lated. 

The solvency of great mercantile companies rests on the 
validity of the laws which have been ascertained to govern the 
seeming irregularity of that human life which the moralist be- 
wails as the most uncertain of things; plague, pestilence, and 
famine are admitted, by all but fools, to be the natural result of 
causes for the most part fully within human control, and not the 
unavoidable tortures inflicted by wrathful Omnipotence upon his 
helpless handiwork. 

Harmonious order governing eternally continuous progress, 
the web and woof of matter and force interweaving by slow de- 
grees, without a broken thread, that veil which lies between us 
and the Infinite — that universe which alone we know, or can 
know — such is the picture which science draws of the world, 
and in proportion as any part of that picture is in unison 
with the rest, so may we feel sure that it is rightly painted. 
Shall Biology alone remain out of harmony with her sister 
sciences ? 

Such arguments against the hypothesis of the direct creation 
of species as these are plainly enough deducible from general 
considerations ; but there are, in addition, phenomena exhibited 
by species themselves, and yet not so much a part of their very 
essence as to have required earlier mention, which are in the high- 
est degree perplexing, if we adopt the popularly accepted hy- 
pothesis. Such are the facts of distribution in space and in time ; 
the singular phenomena brought to light by the study of develop- 
ment ; the structural relations of species upon which our systems 
of classification are founded ; the great doctrines of philosophical 
anatomy, such as that of homology, or of the community of 
structural plan exhibited by large groups of species differing very 
widely in their habits and functions. 

The species of animals which inhabit the sea on opposite sides 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 225 

of the isthmus of Panama are wholly distinct ; ^ the animals and 
plants which inhabit islands are commonly distinct from those 
of the neighboring mainlands, and yet have a similarity of 
aspect. The mammals of the latest Tertiary epoch in the Old 
and New Worlds belong to the same genera, or family groups, as 
those which now inhabit the same great geographical area. The 
crocodilian reptiles which existed in the earliest Secondary epoch 
were similar in general structure to those now Hving, but exhibit 
slight differences in their vertebrae, nasal passages, and one or 
two other points. The guinea pig has teeth which are shed before 
it is born, and hence can never subserve the masticatory purpose 
for which they seem contrived, and, in like manner, the female 
dugong has tusks which never cut the gum. All the members of 
the same great group run through similar conditions in their de- 
velopment, and all their parts, in the adult state, are arranged 
according to the same plan. Man is more like a gorilla than a 
gorilla is like a lemur. Such are a few, taken at random, among 
the multitudes of similar facts which modern research has estab- 
lished ; but when the student seeks for an explanation of them 
from the supporters of the received hypothesis of the origin of 
species, the reply he receives is, in substance, of oriental simplic- 
ity and brevity — "Mashallah ! it so pleases God !" There are 
different species on opposite sides of the isthmus of Panama, 
because they were created different on the two sides. The Plio- 
cene mammals are like the existing ones, because such was the 
plan of creation ; and we find rudimental organs and similarity 
of plan, because it has pleased the Creator to set before himself 
a "divine exemplar or archetype," and to copy it in his works ; 
and somewhat ill, those who hold this view imply, in some of 
them. That such verbal hocus-pocus should be received as 
science will one day be regarded as evidence of the low state of 
intelligence in the nineteenth century, just as we amuse ourselves 
with the phraseology about Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, 
wherewith Torricelli's compatriots were satisfied to explain the 

1 Recent investigations tend to show that this statement is not strictly 
accurate (1870). 



226 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

rise of water in a pump. And be it recollected that this sort of 
satisfaction works not only negative, but positive ill, by dis- 
couraging inquiry, and so depriving man of the usufruct of one 
of the most fertile fields of his great patrimony, Nature. 

The objections to the doctrine of origin of species by special 
creation which have been detailed must have occurred with more 
or less force to the mind of every one who has seriously and inde- 
pendently considered the subject. It is therefore no wonder 
that, from time to time, this hypothesis should have been met by 
counter hypotheses, all as well, and some better, founded than 
itself ; and it is curious to remark that the inventors of the op- 
posing views seem to have been led into them as much by their 
knowledge of geology as by their acquaintance with biology. In 
fact, when the mind has once admitted the conception of the 
gradual production of the present physical state of our globe, 
by natural causes operating through long ages of time, it will be 
little disposed to allow that living beings have made their appear- 
ance in another way, and the speculations of De Maillet and his 
successors are the natural complement of Scilla's demonstration 
of the true nature of fossils. 

A contemporary of Newton and of Leibnitz, sharing, therefore, 
in the intellectual activity of the remarkable age which witnessed 
the birth of modern physical science, Benoit de Maillet spent a 
long life as a consular agent of the French government in various 
Mediterranean ports. For sixteen years, in fact, he held the office 
of Consul- General in Egypt, and the wonderful phenomena offered 
by the valley of the Nile appear to have strongly impressed his 
mind, to have directed his attention to all facts of a similar order 
which came within his observation, and to have led him to specu- 
late on the origin of the present condition of our globe and of its 
inhabitants. But, with all his ardor for science, De Maillet 
seems to have hesitated to publish views which, notwithstanding 
the ingenious attempts to reconcile them with the Hebrew 
hypothesis contained in the preface to Telliamed (and which 
we recommend for Mr. MacCausland's perusal), were hardly 
likely to be received with favor by his contemporaries. 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 227 

But a short time had elapsed since more than one of the great 
anatomists and physicists of the Itah'an school had paid dearly 
for their endeavors to dissipate some of the prevalent errors; 
and their illustrious pupil, Harvey, the founder of modern physiol- 
ogy, had not fared so well, in a country less oppressed by the 
benumbing influences of theology, as to tempt any man to follow 
his example. Probably not uninfluenced by these considerations, 
his Catholic majesty's Consul- General for Egypt kept his theo- 
ries to himself throughout a long life, for Telliamed, the only 
scientific work which is known to have proceeded from his pen, 
was not printed till 1735, when its author had reached the ripe 
a,ge of seventy-nine ; and though De Maillet lived three years 
longer, his book was not given to the world before 1748. Even 
then it was anonymous to those who were not in the secret of the 
anagrammatic character of its title, and the preface and dedica- 
tion are so worded as, in case of necessity, to give the printer a 
fair chance of faUing back on the excuse that the work was in- 
tended for a mere jeu d^ esprit} 

The speculations of the supposititious Indian sage, though quite 
as sound as those of many a "Mosaic Geology" which sells 
exceedingly well, have no great value if we consider them by the 
light of modern science. The waters are supposed to have 
originally covered the whole globe; to have deposited the 
rocky masses which compose its mountains by processes com- 
parable to those which are now forming mud, sand, and shingle ; 
and then to have gradually lowered their level, leaving the spoils 
of the animal and vegetable inhabitants embedded in the strata. 
As the dry land appeared, certain of the aquatic animals are 
supposed to have taken to it, and to have become gradually 
adapted to terrestrial and aerial modes of existence. But if we 
regard the general tenor and style of the reasoning in relation 
to the state of knowledge of the day, two circumstances appear 
very well worthy of remark. The first, that De Maillet had a 
notion of the modifiability of living forms (though without any 
precise information on the subject), and how such modifia- 
^ Play of fancy. — Ed'Uors. 



228 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

bility might account for the origin of species; the second, that 
he very clearly apprehended the great modern geological doctrine, 
so strongly insisted upon by Hutton, and so ably and comprehen- 
sively expounded by Lyell, that we must look to existing causes 
for the explanation of past geological events. Indeed the 
following passage of the preface in which De Maillet is supposed 
to speak of the Indian philosopher Telliamed, his alter ego,^ might 
have been written by the most philosophical uniformitarian of 
the present day. 

"Ce qu'il y a d'etonnant, est que pour arriver a ces connois- 
sances il semble avoir perverti I'ordre naturel, puisqu'au lieu de 
s'attacher d'abord a rechercher I'origine de notre globe il a 
commence par travailler a s'instruire de la nature. Mais a 
I'entendre, ce renversement de I'ordre a ete pour lui I'effet d'un 
genie favorable qui I'a conduit pas a pas et comme par la main 
aux decouvertes les plus sublimes. C'est en decomposant la 
substance de ce globe par une anatomic exacte de toutes ses 
parties qu'il a premierement appris de quelles matieres il etait 
compose et quels arrangemens ces memes matieres observaient 
entre elles. Ces lumieres jointes a 1 'esprit de comparaison tou- 
jours necessaire a quiconque entreprend de percer les voiles dont 
la nature aime a se cacher, ont servi de guide a notre philosophe 
pour parvenir a des connoissances plus interessantes. Par la 
matiere et I'arrangement de ces compositions il pretend avoir 
reconnu quelle est la veritable origine de ce globe que nous 
habitons, comment et par qui il a ete forme." — (Pp. xix, xx.)^ 

1 Other self. — Editors. 

2 What is specially remarkable is that to reach these conclusions he seems 
to have perverted the natural order of reasoning ; for instead of undertak- 
ing from the beginning to investigate the origin of our world, he has begun 
by studying nature. But, if we accept his word, this reversal of the natural 
order has been for him like a friendly spirit, which has led him by the hand, 
step by step, to the most sublime discoveries. It is by an analysis of the 
actual substance of this globe, by means of an exact classification of all its 
parts, that he has, in the first place, learned of what materials it was com- 
posed and what relations these materials bore to each other. This knowl- 
edge, combined with the spirit of comparison always necessary to whoever 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 229 

But De Maillet was before his age, and as could hardly fail to 
happen to one who speculated on a zoological and botanical 
question before Linnaeus, and on a physiological problem before 
Haller, he fell into great errors here and there ; and hence, per- 
haps, the general neglect of his work. Robinet's speculations 
are rather behind than in advance of those of De Maillet, and 
though Linnaeus may have played with the hypothesis of trans- 
mutation, it obtained no serious support until Lamarck adopted 
it, and advocated it with great ability in his Philosophie Zoolo- 
gique. 

Impelled towards the hypothesis of the transmutation of 
species, partly by his general cosmological and geological views ; 
partly by the conception of a graduated, though irregularly 
branching scale of being, which had arisen out of his profound 
study of plants and of the lower forms of animal life, Lamarck, 
whose general line of thought often closely resembles that of De 
Maillet, made a great advance upon the crude and merely specu- 
lative manner in which that writer deals with the question of the 
origin of living beings, by endeavoring to find physical causes 
competent to effect that change of one species into another 
which De Maillet had only supposed to occur. And Lamarck 
conceived that he had found in nature such causes, amply suffi- 
cient for the purpose in view. It is a physiological fact, he says, 
that organs are increased in size by action, atrophied by inaction ; 
it is another physiological fact that modifications produced are 
transmissible to offspring. Change the actions of an animal, 
therefore, and you will change its structure, by increasing the 
development of the parts newly brought into use and by the 
diminution of those less used; but by altering the circum- 
stances which surround it you will alter its actions, and hence, in 
the long run, change of circumstance must produce change of 

endeavors to pierce the veils behind which Nature loves to conceal herself, 
has served our philosopher as a means of coming at more wonderful truths. 
Through the materials and the arrangement of these constituents he believes 
he has discovered the real origin of this world which we live in, how and by 
whom it was made. — Editors. 



230 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

organization. All the species of animals, therefore, are in 
Lamarck's view the result of the indirect action of changes of 
circumstance upon those primitive germs which he considered 
to have originally arisen, by spontaneous generation, within the 
waters of the globe. It is curious, however, that Lamarck should 
insist so strongly ^ as he has done, that circumstances never in 
any degree directly modify the form or the organization of ani- 
mals, but only operate by changing their wants, and consequently 
their actions ; for he thereby brings upon himself the obvious 
question, how, then, do plants, which cannot be said to have 
wants or actions, become modified? To this he replies, that 
they are modified by the changes in their nutritive processes, 
which are effected by changing circumstances ; and it does not 
seem to have occurred to him that such changes might be as well 
supposed to take place among animals. 

When we have said that Lamarck felt that mere speculation 
was not the way to arrive at the origin of species, but that it was 
necessary, in order to the establishment of any sound theory on 
the subject, to discover, by observation or otherwise, some vera 
causa, competent to give rise to them ; that he affirmed the true 
order of classification to coincide with the order of their develop- 
ment one from another ; that he insisted on the necessity of 
allowing sufficient time, very strongly ; and that all the varieties 
of instinct and reason were traced back by him to the same cause 
as that which has given rise to species, 'j we have enumerated 
his chief contributions to the advance of the question. On the 
other hand, from his ignorance of any power in nature competent 
to modify the structure of animals, except the development of 
parts, or atrophy of them, in consequence of a change of needs, 
Lamarck was led to attach infinitely greater weight than it 
deserves to this agency, and the absurdities into which he was 
led have met with deserved condemnation. Of the struggle 
for existence, on which as we shall see Mr. Darwin lays such 
great stress, he had no conception ; indeed, he doubts whether 
there really are such things as extinct species, unless they be such 
1 See Philosophie Zoologique, vol. i, p. 222, et seq. 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 23 f 

large animals as may have met their death at the hands of man ; 
and so little does he dream of there being any other destructive 
causes at work, that, in discussing the possible existence of fossil 
shells, he asks, "Pourquoi d'ailleurs seroient-ils perdues des 
que I'homme n'a pu operer leur destruction?"^ Of the in- 
fluence of selection Lamarck has as little notion, and he makes 
no use of the wonderful phenomena which are exhibited by 
domesticated animals, and illustrate its powers. The vast in- 
fluence of Cuvier was employed against the Lamarckian views, 
and as the untenability of some of his conclusions was easily 
shown, his doctrines sank under the opprobrium of scientific as 
well as of theological heterodoxy. Nor have the efforts made 
of late years to revive them tended to reestablish their credit in 
the minds of sound thinkers acquainted with the facts of the 
case ; indeed it may be doubted whether Lamarck has not 
suffered more from his friends than from his foes. 

Two years ago, in fact, though we venture to question if even 
the strongest supporters of the special creation hypothesis had 
not, now and then, an uneasy consciousness that all was not 
right, their position seemed more impregnable than ever, if not 
by its own inherent strength, at any rate by the obvious failure 
of all the attempts which had been made to carry it. On the 
other hand, however much the few, who thought deeply on the 
question of species, might be repelled by the generally received 
dogmas, they saw no way of escaping from them, save by the 
adoption of suppositions, so little justified by experiment or by 
observation, as to be at least equally distasteful. 

The choice lay between two absurdities and a middle condition 
of uneasy skepticism ; which last, however unpleasant and un- 
satisfactory, was obviously the only justifiable state of mind 
under the circumstances. 

Such being the general ferment in the minds of naturalists, it 
is no wonder that they mustered strong in the rooms of the 
Linnaean Society, on the first of July of the year 1858, to hear 

^ How could they have been destroyed, since man has not been able to 
effect their destruction? — Editors. {Philosophie Zoologique, vo'. i, p. 77.) 



232 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

two papers by authors living on opposite sides of the globe, work- 
ing out their results independently, and yet professing to have 
discovered one and the same solution of all the problems con- 
nected with species. The one of these authors was an able 
naturalist, Mr. Wallace, who had been employed for some years 
in studying the productions of the islands of the Indian Archi- 
pelago, and who had forwarded a memoir embodying his views 
to Mr. Darwin, for communication to the Linnaean Society. On 
perusing the essay, Mr. Darwin was not a little surprised to find 
that it embodied some of the leading ideas of a great work which 
he had been preparing for twenty years, and parts of which, 
containing a development of the very same views, had been 
perused by his private friends fifteen or sixteen years before. 
Perplexed in what manner to do full justice both to his friend 
and to himself, Mr. Darwin placed the matter in the hands of 
Dr. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, by whose advice he communi- 
cated a brief abstract of his own views to the Linnaean Society, 
at the same time that Mr. Wallace's paper was read. Of that 
abstract, the work on the Origin of Species is an enlargement, 
but a complete statement of Mr. Darwin's doctrine is looked for 
in the large and well-illustrated work which he is said to be pre- 
paring for publication. 

The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently 
simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions 
may be stated in a very few words : ~ all species have been pro- 
duced by the development of varieties from common stocks, by 
the conversion of these, first into permanent races and then into 
new species, by the process of natural selection, which process is 
essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man 
has originated the races of domestic animals — the struggle for 
existence taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of 
natural selection, that selective action which he performs in 
artificial selection. 

The evidence brought forward by Mr. Darwin in support of 
his hypothesis is of three kinds. First, he endeavors to prove 






DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 233 

that species may be originated by selection ; secondly, he at- 
tempts to show that natural causes are competent to exert 
selection ; and thirdly, he tries to prove that the most remarkable 
and apparently anomalous phenomena exhibited by the distri- 
bution, development, and mutual relations of species, can be 
shown to be deducible from the general doctrine of their origin, 
which he propounds, combined with the known facts of geologi- 
cal change; and that, even if all these phenomena are not at 
present explicable by it, none are necessarily inconsistent with it. 
There cannot be a doubt that the method of inquiry which 
Mr. Darwin has adopted is not only rigorously in accordance 
with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate 
method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathe- 
matics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives 
by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly 
about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not 
Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical 
acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied 
them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr. Mill's admirable 
chapter "On the Deductive Method," that there are multitudes 
of scientific inquiries, in which the method of pure induction 
helps the investigator but a very little way. 

"The mode of investigation," says Mr. Mill, "which, from the 
proved inapplicability of direct methods of observation and 
experiment, remains to us as the main source of the knowledge we 
possess, or can acquire, respecting the conditions and laws of 
recurrence of the more complex phenomena, is called, in its most 
general expression, the deductive method, and consists of three 
operations : the first, one of direct induction ; the second, of 
ratiocination ; and the third, of verification." 

Now, the conditions which have determined the existence of 
species are not only exceedingly complex, but, so far as the great 
majority of them are concerned, are necessarily beyond our 
cognizance. But what Mr. Darwin has attempted to do is in 



234 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

exact accordance with the rule laid down by Mr. Mill ; he has 
endeavored to determine certain great facts inductively, by ob- 
servation and experiment ; he has then reasoned from the data 
thus furnished ; and lastly, he has tested the validity of his rati- 
ocination by comparing his deductions with the observed facts 
of nature. Inductively, Mr. Darwin endeavors to prove that 
species arise in a given way. Deductively, he desires to show 
that, if they arise in that way, the facts of distribution, develop- 
ment, classification, etc., maybe accounted for, i.e., may be de- 
duced from their mode of origin, combined with admitted 
changes in physical geography and climate, during an indefinite 
period. And this explanation, or coincidence of observed with 
deduced facts, is, so far as it extends, a verification of the 
Darwinian view. 

There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, then ; 
but it is another question whether he has fulfilled all the condi- 
tions imposed by that method. Is it satisfactorily proved, in 
fact, that species may be originated by selection ? that there is 
such a thing as natural selection ? that none of the phenomena 
exhibited by species are inconsistent with the origin of species 
in this way ? If these questions can be answered in the affirma- 
tive, Mr. Darwin's view steps out of the ranks of hypotheses into 
those of proved theories ; but so long as the evidence at present 
adduced falls short of enforcing that afl&rmation, so long, to our 
minds, must the new doctrine be content to remain among the 
former — an extremely valuable, and in the highest degree prob- 
able, doctrine, indeed the only extant hypothesis which is worth 
anything in a scientific point of view ; but still a hypothesis, and 
not yet the theory of species. 

After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against 
Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence 
stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having 
all the characters exhibited by species in nature, has ever been 
originated by selection, whether artificial or natural. Groups 
having the morphological character of species, distinct and per- 
manent races in fact, have been so produced over and over again ; 



1 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 235 

but there is no positive evidence at present that any group of 
animals has, by variation and selective breeding, given rise to 
another group which was even in the least degree infertile with 
the first. Mr. Darwin is perfectly aware of this weak point, and 
brings forward a multitude of ingenious and important arguments 
to diminish the force of the objection. We admit the value of 
these arguments to their fullest extent ; nay, we will go so far 
as to express our belief that experiments, conducted by a skillful 
physiologist, would very probably obtain the desired production 
of mutually more or less infertile breeds from a common stock, 
in a comparatively few years ; but still, as the case stands at pres- 
ent, this "little rift within the lute" is not to be disguised nor 
overlooked. 

In the remainder of Mr. Darwin's argument our own private 
ingenuity has not hitherto enabled us to pick holes of any great 
importance ; and judging by what we hear and read, other 
adventurers in the same field do not seem to have been much 
more fortunate. It has been urged, for instance, that in his 
chapters on the struggle for existence and on natural selection, 
Mr. Darwin does not so much prove that natural selection does 
occur, as that it must occur ; but, in fact, no other sort of demon- 
stration is attainable. A race does not attract our attention in 
nature until it has, in all probability, existed for a considerable 
time, and then it is too late to inquire into the conditions of its 
origin. Again, it is said that there is no real analogy between the 
selection which takes place under domestication, by human in- 
fluence, and any operation which can be effected by nature, for 
man interferes intelligently. Reduced to its elements, this 
argument implies that an effect produced with trouble by an 
intelligent agent must, a fortiori,^ be more troublesome, if not im- 
possible, to an unintelligent agent. Even putting aside the 
question whether nature, acting as she does according to definite 
and invariable laws, can be rightly called an unintelligent agent, 
such a position as this is wholly untenable. Mix salt and sand, 
and it shall puzzle the wisest of men with his mere natural appli- 
^ All the more. — Editors. 



236 THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

ances to separate all the grains of sand from all the grains of 
salt ; but a shower of rain will effect the same object in ten min- 
utes. And so while man may find it tax all his intelligence to 
separate any variety which arises, and to breed selectively from 
it, the destructive agencies incessantly at work in nature, if 
they find one variety to be more soluble in circumstances than 
the other, will inevitably in the long run eliminate it. 

A frequent and a just objection to the Lamarckian hypothesis 
of the transmutation of species is based upon the absence of 
transitional forms between many species. But against the 
Darwinian hypothesis this argument has no force. Indeed, one 
of the most valuable and suggestive parts of Mr. Darwin's 
work is that in which he proves that the frequent absence of 
transitions is a necessary consequence of his doctrine, and that 
the stock whence two or more species have sprung, need in no 
respect be intermediate between these species. If any two 
species have arisen from a common stock in the same way as the 
carrier and the pouter, say, have arisen from the rock pigeon, 
then the common stock of these two species need be no more 
intermediate between the two than the rock pigeon is between 
the carrier and pouter. Clearly appreciate the force of this 
analogy, and all the arguments against the origin of species by 
selection, based on the absence of transitional forms, fall to the 
ground. And Mr. Darwin's position might, we think, have 
been even stronger than it is if he had not embarrassed himself 
with the aphorism, " Natura nonfacit saltum,'^ ^ which turns up so 
often in his pages. We believe, as we have said above, that 
nature does make jumps now and then, and a recognition of the 
fact is of no small importance in disposing of many minor ob- 
jections to the doctrine of transmutation. 

But we must pause. The discussion of Mr. Darwin's argu- 
ments in detail would lead us far beyond the limits within which 
we proposed, at starting, to confine this article. Our object 
has been attained if we have given an intelligible, however brief, 
account of the established facts connected with species, and of 
^ Natvire does not advance in leaps. — Editors. 



DARWIN ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 237 

the relation of the explanation of those facts offered by Mr. Dar- 
win to the theoretical views held by his predecessors and his con- 
temporaries, and, above all, to the requirements of scientific logic. 
We have ventured to point out that it does not, as yet, satisfy 
all those requirements ; but we do not hesitate to assert that it is 
as superior to any preceding or contemporary hypothesis, in the 
extent of observational and experimental basis on which it rests, 
in its rigorously scientific method, and in its power of explaining 
biological phenomena, as was the hypothesis of Copernicus to the 
speculations of Ptolemy. But the planetary orbits turned out 
to be not quite circular after all, and grand as was the service 
Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and Newton had to come 
after him. What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little 
too circular ? What if species should offer residual phenomena, 
here and there, not explicable by natural selection? Twenty 
years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this 
is, or is not, the case ; but in either event they will owe the 
author of The Origin of Species an immense debt of gratitude. 
We should leave a very wrong impression on the reader's mind if 
we permitted him to suppose that the value of that work depends 
wholly on the ultimate justification of the theoretical views which 
it contains. On the contrary, if they were disproved to-morrow, 
the book would still be the best of its kind — the most compen- 
dious statement of well-sifted facts bearing on the doctrine of 
species that has ever appeared. The chapters on Variation, on 
the Struggle for Existence, on Instinct, on Hybridism, on the 
Imperfection of the Geological Record, on Geographical Distribu- 
tion, have not only no equals, but, so far as our knowledge goes, 
no competitors, within the range of biological literature. And 
viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of 
von Baer's Researches on Development, thirty years ago, any 
work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not 
only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of 
Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly 
penetrated. 



IX 

DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 

AXFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

[Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-), distinguished as a scientist and as joint 
proponent, with Darwin, of the theory of evolution, became interested in 
natural science at about his twentieth year. As early as 1847 his ideas were 
directed to the study of species, and especially of the causes of their ori- 
gin. Under an impulse provided in part by Darwin's Journal, he decided to 
make natural history collections in the region of the Amazon, and later in the 
Malayan Archipelago. Continuing here his investigations of the phenomena 
of species, he entered into correspondence with Darwin, to whom in 1858 he 
communicated his independent discovery of what are now known as the 
laws of selection and of the surv'ival of the fittest. Darwin himself, how- 
ever, had formulated the same laws twenty years before, but had occupied 
himself in the meanwhile by gathering biological and geological evidence in 
support of his conclusions, in order to publish them not as an unsupported 
theory, but as substantially a scientific certainty. The results of the sepa- 
rate investigations of the two scholars were presented simultaneously to the 
Linnsan Society in 1858; but in the following year Darwin's Origin of 
Species, which presented an overwhelming mass of scientific evidence in 
support of the idea, permanently associated Darwin's name with the theory. 
Wallace's attitude toward the question of credit for the discovery of this 
theory was throughout one of admirable modesty. 

Darwinism Applied to Man, which is the concluding chapter of the volume 
Darwinism, published in 1889, is a sound and interesting review of the ap- 
plication of the law of evolution to mankind, and in addition something of a 
history of his civilization. Wallace's view of man's place in nature, it must 
be mentioned, was largely determined by a religious habit of mind. For 
this reason his interpretation of the most striking point of specific differen- 
tiation between man and the lower animals, the evidences of what he calls 
a "higher nature," traces man's special faculties not to inherited capacities 
but to a distinct spiritual gift. This view presents an interesting contrast 
to Huxley's opinion that man's special attainments have resulted from his 
acquisition, through purely evolutional forces, of the power of articulate 
speech, whence his ability to communicate abstract ideas.] 

238 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 239 

Our review of modern Darwinism might fitly have terminated 
with the preceding chapter ; but the immense interest that at- 
taches to the origin of the human race, and the amount of miscon- 
ception which prevails regarding the essential teachings of Dar- 
win's theory on this question, as well as regarding my own special 
views upon it, induce me to devote a final chapter to its discussion. 

To any one who considers the structure of man's body, even 
in the most superficial manner, it must be evident that it is the 
body of an animal, differing greatly, it is true, from the bodies 
of all other animals, but agreeing with them in all essential fea- 
tures. The bony structure of man classes him as a vertebrate ; 
the mode of suckling his young classes him as a mammal ; his 
blood, his muscles, and his nerves, the structure bf his heart 
with its veins and arteries, his lungs and his whole respiratory 
and circulatory systems, all closely correspond to those of 
other mammals, and are often almost identical with them. He 
possesses the same number of limbs terminating in the same num- 
ber of digits as belong fundamentally to the mammalian class. 
His senses are identical with theirs, and his organs of sense are 
the same in number and occupy the same relative position. 
Every detail of structure which is common to the mammalia as 
a class is found also in man, while he only differs from them in 
such ways and degrees as the various species or groups of mam- 
mals differ from each other. If, then, we have good reason to 
believe that every existing group of mammalia has descended 
from some common ancestral form — as we saw to be so com- 
pletely demonstrated in the case of the horse tribe, — and that 
each family, each order, and even the whole class must similarly 
have descended from some much more ancient and more general- 
ized type, it would be in the highest degree improbable — so 
improbable as to be almost inconceivable — that man, agreeing 
with them so closely in every detail of his structure, should have 
had some quite distinct mode of origin. Let us, then, see what 
other evidence bears upon the question, and whether it is suffi- 
cient to convert the probability of his animal origin into a 
practical certainty. 



240 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

All the higher animals present rudiments of organs which, 
though useless to them, are useful in some allied group, and are 
believed to have descended from a common ancestor in which 
they were useful. Thus there are in ruminants rudiments of in- 
cisor teeth which, in some species, never cut through the gums ; 
many lizards have external rudimentary legs ; while many birds, 
as the Apteryx, have quite rudimentary wings. Now man pos- 
sesses similar rudiments, sometimes constantly, sometimes only 
occasionally present, which serve intimately to connect his 
bodily structure with that of the lower animals. Many animals, 
for example, have a special muscle for moving or twitching the 
skin. In man there are remnants of this in certain parts of the 
body, especially in the forehead, enabling us to raise our eye- 
brows ; but some persons have it in other parts. A few persons 
are able to move the whole scalp so as to throw ofT any object 
placed on the head, and this property has been proved, in one 
case, to be inherited. In the outer fold of the ear there is some- 
times a projecting point, corresponding in position to the pointed 
ear of many animals, and believed to be a rudiment of it. In 
the alimentary canal there is a rudiment — the vermiform ap- 
pendage of the caecum — which is not only useless, but is some- 
times a cause of disease and death in man ; yet in many vege- 
table feeding animals it is very long, and even in the orang-utan 
it is of considerable length and convoluted. So, man possesses 
rudimentary bones of a tail concealed beneath the skin, and, in 
some rare cases, this forms a minute external tail. 

The variability of every part of man's structure is very great, 
and many of these variations tend to approximate towards the 
structure of other animals. The courses of the arteries are 
eminently variable, so that for surgical purposes it has been 
necessary to determine the probable proportion of each varia- 
tion. The muscles are so variable that in fifty cases the muscles 
of the foot were found to be not strictly alike in any two, and in 
some the deviations were considerable ; while in thirty-six sub- 
jects Mr. J. Wood observed no fewer than 558 muscular varia- 
tions. The same author states that in a single male subject 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 241 

there were no fewer than seven muscular variations, all of which 
plainly represented muscles proper to various kinds of apes. 
The muscles of the hands and arms — parts which are so emi- 
nently characteristic of man — are extremely liable to vary, so 
as to resemble the corresponding muscles of the lower animals. 
That such variations are due to reversion to a former state of 
existence Mr. Darwin thinks highly probable, and he adds : "It 
is quite incredible that a man should, through mere accident, 
abnormally resemble certain apes in no less than seven of his 
muscles, if there had been no genetic connection between them. 
On the other hand, if man is descended from some apelike 
creature, no valid reason can be assigned why certain muscles 
should not suddenly reappear after an interval of many thou- 
sand generations, in the same manner as, with horses, asses, and 
mules, dark colored stripes suddenly reappear on the legs and 
shoulders, after an interval of hundreds, or more probably of 
thousands, of generations." ^ 

The progressive development of any vertebrate from the ovum 
or minute embryonic egg affords one of the most marvelous 
chapters in Natural History. We see the contents of the ovum 
undergoing numerous definite changes, its interior dividing and 
subdividing till it consists of a mass of cells; then a groove ap- 
pears marking out the median line or vertebral column of the 
future animal, and thereafter are slowly developed the various 
essential organs of the body. After describing in some detail 
what takes place in the case of the ovum of the dog, Professor 
Huxley continues: "The history of the development of any 
other vertebrate animal, lizard, snake, frog, or fish, tells the 
same story. There is always to begin with, an egg having the 
same essential structure as that of the dog ; the yolk of that egg 
undergoes division or segmentation, as it is called; the ultimate 
products of that segmentation constitute the building materials 
for the body of the young animal ; and this is built up round a 
primitive groove, in the floor of which a notochord is developed. 
1 Descent of Man, pp. 41-43; also pp. 13-15. 



r 



^42 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

Furthermore, there is a period in which the young of all these 
animals resemble one another, not merely in outward form, but 
in all essentials of structure, so closely that the differences 
between them are inconsiderable, while in their subsequent 
course they diverge more and more widely from one another. 
And it is a general law that the more closely any animals re- 
semble one another in adult structure, the longer and the more 
intimately do their embryos resemble one another ; so that, for 
example, the embryos of a snake and of a lizard remain like 
one another longer than do those of a snake and a bird ; and the 
embryos of a dog and of a cat remain like one another for a far 
longer period than do those of a dog and a bird, or of a dog 
and an opossum, or even than those of a dog and a monkey." ^ 
We thus see that the study of development affords a test of 
affinity in animals that are externally very much unlike each 
other ; and we naturally ask how this applies to man. Is he 
developed in a different way from other mammals, as we should 
certainly expect if he has had a distinct and altogether different 
origin? "The reply," says Professor Huxley, "is not doubtful 
for a moment. Without question, the mode of origin and the 
early stages of the development of man are identical with those 
of the animals immediately below him in the scale." And again 
he tells us : " It is very long before the body of the young human 
being can be readily discriminated from that of the young 
puppy ; but at a tolerably early period the two become distin- 
guishable by the different forms of their adjuncts, the yolk-sac 
and the allantois;" and after describing these differences he 
continues : " But exactly in those respects in which the develop- 
ing man differs from the dog, he resembles the ape. ... So 
that it is only quite in the later stages of development that the 
young human being presents marked differences from the young 
ape, while the latter departs as much from the dog in its develop- 
ment as the man does. Startling as this last assertion may ap- 
pear to be, it is demonstrably true, and it alone appears to me 
sufl&cient to place beyond all doubt the structural unity of man 
1 Man's Place in Nature, p. 64. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 243 

with the rest of the animal world, and more particularly and 
closely with the apes." ^ 

A few of the curious details in which man passes through 
stages common to the lower animals may be mentioned. At 
one stage the os coccyx projects like a true tail, extending con- 
siderably beyond the rudimentary legs. In the seventh month 
the convolutions of the brain resemble those of an adult baboon. 
The great toe, so characteristic of man, forming the fulcrum 
which most assists him in standing erect, in an early stage of the 
embryo is much shorter than the other toes, and instead of 
being parallel with them, projects at an angle from the side of 
the foot, thus corresponding with its permanent condition in the 
quadrumana. Numerous other examples might be quoted, all 
illustrating the same general law. 

Though the fact is so well known, it is certainly one of pro- 
found significance that many animal diseases can be communi- 
cated to man, since it shows similarity, if not identity, in the 
minute structure of the tissues, the nature of the blood, the 
nerves, and the brain. Such diseases as hydrophobia, variola, 
the glanders, cholera, herpes, etc., can be transmitted from ani- 
mals to man or the reverse ; while monkeys are liable to many 
of the same noncontagious diseases as we are. Rengger, who 
carefully observed the common monkey {Cebus Azarcs) in Para- 
guay, found it Kable to catarrh, with the usual symptoms, ter- 
minating sometimes in consumption. These monkeys also 
suffered from apoplexy, inflammation of the bowels, and cataract 
in the eye. Medicines produced the same effect upon them as 
upon us. Many kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, 
coffee, spirits, and even tobacco. These facts show the simi- 
larity of the nerves of taste in monkeys and in ourselves, and 
that their whole nervous system is affected in a similar way. 
Even the parasites, both external and internal, that affect man 
are not altogether peculiar to him, but belong to the same 
families or genera as those which infest animals, and in one case, 
^ Man's Place in Nature, p. 67. 



244 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

scabies, even the same species.^ These curious facts seem quite 
inconsistent with the idea that man's bodily structure and nature 
are altogether distinct from those of animals, and have had a 
different origin ; while the facts are just what we should expect 
if he has been produced by descent with modification from some 
common ancestor. 

By universal consent we see in the monkey tribe a caricature 
of humanity. Their faces, their hands, their actions and ex- 
pressions present ludicrous resemblances to our own. But there 
is one group of this great tribe in which this resemblance is 
greatest, and they have hence been called the anthropoid or 
manlike apes. These are few in number, and inhabit only the 
equatorial regions of Africa and Asia, coim tries where the climate 
is most uniform, the forests densest, and the supply of fruit 
abundant throughout the year. These animals are now com- 
paratively well known, consisting of the orang-utan of Borneo 
and Sumatra, the chimpanzee and the gorilla of West Africa, 
and the group of gibbons or long-armed apes, consisting of many 
species and inhabiting Southeastern Asia and the larger Malay 
Islands. These last are far less like man than the other three, 
one or other of which has at various times been claimed to 
be the most manlike of the apes and our nearest relations 
in the animal kingdom. The question of the degree of resem- 
blance of these animals to ourselves is one of great interest, 
leading, as it does, to some important conclusions as to our 
origin and geological antiquity, and we will therefore briefly 
consider it. 

If we compare the skeletons of the orang or chimpanzee with 
that of man, we find them to be a kind of distorted copy, every 
bone corresponding (with very few exceptions), but altered some- 
what in size, proportions, and position. So great is this resem- 
blance that it led Professor Owen to remark: "I cannot shut 
my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of 
structure — every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous — 
^ The Descent of Man, pp. 7, 8. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 245 

which makes the determination of the difference between Homo 
and Pithecus the anatomist's difficulty." 

The actual differences in the skeletons of these apes and that 
of man — that is, differences dependent on the presence or ab- 
sence of certain bones, and not on their form or position — have 
been enumerated by Mr. Mivart as follows : (i) In the breast- 
bone consisting of but two bones, man agrees with the gibbons ; 
the chimpanzee and gorilla having this part consisting of seven 
bones in a single series, while in the orang they are arranged in 
a double series of ten bones. (2) The normal number of the 
ribs in the orang and some gibbons is twelve pairs, as in man, 
while in the chimpanzee and gorilla there are thirteen pairs. 

(3) The orang and the gibbons also agree with man in having 
five lumbar vertebrae, while in the gorilla and the chimpanzee 
there are but four, and sometimes only three. (4) The gorilla 
and chimpanzee agree with man in having eight small bones in 
the wrist, while the orang and the gibbons, as well as all other 
monkeys, have nine.^ 

The differences in the form, size, and attachments of the vari- 
ous bones, muscles, and other organs of these apes and man are 
very numerous and exceedingly complex, sometimes one species, 
sometimes another agreeing most nearly with ourselves, thus 
presenting a tangled web of affinities which it is very difficult to 
unravel. Estimated by the skeleton alone, the chimpanzee and 
gorilla seem nearer to man than the orang, which last is also 
inferior as presenting certain aberrations in the muscles. In the 
form of the ear the gorilla is more human than any other ape, 
while in the tongue the orang is the more manlike. In the 
stomach and liver the gibbons approach nearest to man ; then 
come the orang and chimpanzee, while the gorilla has a de- 
graded liver more resembling that of the lower monkeys and 
baboons. 

1 Man and Apes. By St. George Mivart, F.R.S., 1873. It is an interest- 
ing fact (for which I am indebted to Mr. E. B. Poulton) that the human 
embryo possesses the extra rib and wrist bone referred to above in (2) and 

(4) as occurring in some of the apes. 



246 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

We come now to that part of his organization in which man 
is so much higher than all the lower animals — the brain ; and 
here, Mr. Mivart informs us, the orang stands highest in rank. 
The height of the orang's cerebrum in front is greater in propor- 
tion than in either the chimpanzee or the gorilla. "On compar- 
ing the brain of. man with the brains of the orang, chimpanzee, 
and baboon, we find a successive decrease in the frontal lobe, 
and a successive and very great increase in the relative size of 
the occipital lobe. Concomitantly with this increase and de- 
crease, certain folds of brain substance, called ' bridging convo- 
lutions,' which in man are conspicuously interposed between the 
parietal and occipital lobes, seem as utterly to disappear in the 
chimpanzee, as they do in the baboon. In the orang, however, 
though much reduced, they are still to be distinguished. . . . 
The actual and absolute mass of the brain is, however, slightly 
greater in the chimpanzee than in the orang, as is the relative 
vertical extent of the middle part of the cerebrum, although, 
as already stated, the frontal portion is higher in the orang; 
while, according to M. Gratiolet, the gorilla is not only inferior 
to the orang in cerebral development, but even to his smaller 
African congener, the chimpanzee." ^ 

On the whole, then, we find that no one of the great apes can 
be positively asserted to be nearest to man in structure. Each 
of them approaches him in certain characteristics, while in 
others it is widely removed, giving the idea, so consonant with 
the theory of evolution as developed by Darwin, that all are 
derived from a common ancestor, from which the existing 
anthropoid apes as well as man have diverged. When, how- 
ever, we turn from the details of anatomy to peculiarities 
of external form and motions, we find that in a variety of 
characters all these apes resemble each other and differ from 
man, so that we may fairly say that while they have diverged 
somewhat from each other, they have diverged much more 
widely from ourselves. Let us briefly enumerate some of these 
differences. 

* Man and Apes, pp. 138, 144. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 247 

All apes have large canine teeth, while in man these are no 
longer than the adjacent incisors or premolars, the whole form- 
ing a perfectly even series. In apes the arms are proportionately 
much longer than in man, while the thighs are much shorter. 
No ape stands really erect, a posture which is natural in man. 
The thumb is proportionately larger in man, and more perfectly 
opposable than in that of any ape. The foot of man differs 
largely from that of all apes, in the horizontal sole, the project- 
ing heel, the short toes, and the powerful great toe firmly at- 
tached parallel to the other toes ; all perfectly adapted for main- 
taining the erect posture, and for free motion without any aid 
from the arms or hands. In apes the foot is formed almost ex- 
actly like our hand, with a large thumblike great toe quite free 
from the other toes, and so articulated as to be opposable to 
them ; forming with the long fingerlike toes a perfect grasping 
hand. The sole cannot be placed horizontally on the ground ; 
but when standing on a level surface the animal rests on the 
outer edge of the foot with the finger and thumblike toes partly 
closed, while the hands are placed on the ground resting on the 
knuckles. . . . 

The four limbs, with the peculiarly formed feet and hands, are 
those of arboreal animals which only occasionally and awkwardly 
move on level ground. The arms are used in progression equally 
with the feet, and the hands are only adapted for uses similar to 
those of our hands when the animal is at rest, and then but 
clumsily. Lastly, the apes are all hairy animals, like the ma- 
jority of other mammals, man alone having a smooth and almost 
naked skin. These numerous and striking differences, even more 
than those of the skeleton and internal anatomy, point to an 
enormously remote epoch when the race that was ultimately to 
develop into man diverged from that other stock which con- 
tinued the animal type and ultimately produced the existing 
varieties of anthropoid apes. 

The facts now very briefly summarized amount almost to a 
demonstration that man, in his bodily structure, has been de- 



248 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

rived from the lower animals, of which he is the culminating 
development. In his possession of rudimentary structures which 
are functional in some of the mammalia ; in the numerous varia- 
tions of his muscles and other organs agreeing with characters 
which are constant in some apes ; in his embryonic development, 
absolutely identical in character with that of mammalia in 
general, and closely resembling in its details that of the higher 
quadrumana ; in the diseases which he has in common with 
other mammalia ; and in the wonderful approximation of his 
skeleton to those of one or other of the anthropoid apes, we have 
an amount of evidence in this direction which it seems impos- 
sible to explain away. And this evidence will appear more forci- 
ble if we consider for a moment what the rejection of it implies. 
For the only alternative supposition is, that man has been 
specially created — that is to say, has been produced in some 
quite different way from other animals and altogether inde- 
pendently of them. But in that case the rudimentary structures, 
the animal-like variations, the identical course of development, 
and all the other animal characteristics he possesses are decep- 
tive, and inevitably lead us, as thinking beings making use of 
the reason which is our noblest and most distinctive feature, 
into gross error. 

We cannot believe, however, that a careful study of the facts 
of nature leads to conclusions directly opposed to the truth ; and, 
as we seek in vain, in our physical structure and the course of 
its development, for any indication of an origin independent of 
the rest of the animal world, we are compelled to reject the idea 
of "special creation" for man, as being entirely unsupported by 
facts as well as in the highest degree improbable. 

The evidence we now possess of the exact nature of the re- 
semblance of man to the various species of anthropoid apes, 
shows us that he has little special affinity for any one rather than 
another species, while he differs from them all in several impor- 
tant characters in which they agree with each other. The con- 
clusion to be drawn from these facts is, that his points of afl&nity 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 249 

connect him with the whole group, while his special peculiarities 
equally separate him from the whole group, and that he must, 
therefore, have diverged from the common ancestral form before 
the existing types of anthropoid apes had diverged from each 
other. Now, this divergence almost certainly took place as 
early as the Miocene period, because in the Upper Miocene de- 
posits of Western Europe remains of two species of ape have 
been found allied to the gibbons, one of them, Dryopithecus, 
nearly as large as a man, and believed by M. Lartet to have 
approached man in its dentition more than the existing apes. 
We seem hardly, therefore, to have reached, in the Upper Mio- 
cene, the epoch of the common ancestor of man and the anthro- 
poids. 

The evidence of the antiquity of man himself is also scanty, 
and takes us but very little way back into the past. We have 
clear proof of his existence in Europe in the latter stages of the 
Glacial epoch, with many indications of his presence in iriter-Gla- 
cial or even pre-Glacial times ; while both the actual remains and 
the works of man found in the auriferous gravels of California 
deep under lava-flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the 
New World at least as early as in the Old.^ These earliest re- 
mains of man have been received with doubt, and even with 
ridicule, as if there were some extreme improbability in them. 
But, in point of fact, the wonder is that human remains have 
not been found more frequently in pre-Glacial deposits. Refer- 
ring to the most ancient fossil remains found in Europe, — the 
Engis and Neanderthal crania, — Professor Huxley makes the 
following weighty remark : "In conclusion, I may say, that the 
fossil remains of Man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to 
take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form, by the 
modification of which he has, probably, become what he is." 
The Californian remains and works of art, above referred to, 
give no indication of a specially low form of man ; and it re- 
mains an unsolved problem why no traces of the long line of 

' For a sketch of the evidence of Man's Antiquity in America, see the 
Nineteenth Century for November, 1887. 



2 50 



ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 



man's ancestors, back to the remote period when he first branched 
off from the pitheoid type, have yet been discovered. 

It has been objected by some writers — notably by Professor 
Boyd Dawkins — that man did not probably exist in Pliocene 
times, because almost all the known mammalia of that epoch 
are distinct species from those now living on the earth, and that 
the same changes of the environment which led to the modifica- 
tion of other mammalian species would also have led to a change 
in man. But this argument overlooks the fact that man differs 
essentially from all other mammals in this respect, that whereas 
any important adaptation to new conditions can be effected in 
them only by a change in bodily structure, man is able to adapt 
himself to much greater changes of conditions by a mental de- 
velopment leading him to the use of fire, of tools, of clothing, 
of improved dwellings, of nets and snares, and of agriculture. 
By the help of these, without any change whatever in his bodily 
structure, he has been able to spread over and occupy the whole 
earth ; to dwell securely in forest, plain, or mountain ; to in- 
habit alike the burning desert or the arctic wastes ; to cope with 
every kind of wild beast, and to provide himself with food in 
districts where, as an animal trusting to nature's unaided pro- 
ductions, he would have starved.^ 

It follows, therefore, that from the time when the ancestral 
man first walked erect, with hands freed from any active part 
in locomotion, and when his brain power became sufficient to 
cause him to use his hands in making weapons and tools, houses 
and clothing, to use fire for cooking, and to plant seeds or roots 
to supply himself with stores of food, the power of natural selec- 
tion would cease to act in producing modifications of his body, 
but would continuously advance his mind through the develop- 
ment of its organ, the brain. Hence man may have become 
truly man — the species, Homo sapiens — even in the Miocene 
period; and while all other mammals were becoming modified 

1 This subject was first discussed in an artiqle in the Anthropological Re- 
view, May, 1864, and republished in my Contributions to Natural Selection, 
chap, ix, in 1870. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 251 

from age to age under the influence of ever changing physical 
and biological conditions, he would be advancing mainly in intel- 
ligence, but perhaps also in stature, and by that advance alone 
would be able to maintain himself as the master of all other 
animals and as the most widespread occupier of the earth. It 
is quite in accordance with this view that we fioid .the most pro- 
nounced distinction between man and the anthropoid apes in 
the size and complexity of his brain. Thus, Professor Huxley 
tells us that "it may be doubted whether a healthy human adult 
brain ever weighed less than 31 or 32 ounces, or that the heaviest 
gorilla brain has exceeded 20 ounces," although "a full-grown 
gorilla is probably pretty nearly twice as heavy as a Bosjes man, 
or as many an European woman." ^ The average human brain, 
however, weighs 48 or 49 ounces, and if we take the average ape 
brain at only 2 ounces less than the very largest gorilla's brain, 
or 18 ounces, we shall see better the enormous increase which 
has taken place in the brain of man since the time when he 
branched off from the apes ; and this increase will be still greater 
if we consider that the brains of apes, like those of all other mam- 
mals, have also increased from earlier to later geological times. 
If these various considerations are taken into account, we 
must conclude that the essential features of man's structure as 
compared with that of apes — his erect posture and free hands 
— were acquired at a comparatively early period, and were, in 
fact, the characteristics which gave him his superiority over 
other mammals, and started him on the line of development 
which has led to his conquest of the world. But during this 
long and steady development of brain and intellect, mankind 
must have continuously increased in numbers and in the area 
which they occupied — they must have formed what Darwin 
terms a "dominant race." For had they been few in numbers 
and confined to a limited area, they could hardly have success- 
fully struggled against the numerous fierce carnivora of that 
period, and against those adverse influences which led to the 
extinction of so many more powerful animals. A large popula- 
* Man's Place in Nature, p. 102. 



2 52 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

tion spread over an extensive area is also needed to supply an 
adequate number of brain variations for man's progressive im- 
provement. But this large population and long-continued de- 
velopment in a single line of advance renders it the more diffi- 
cult to account for the complete absence of human or prehuman 
remains in all those deposits which have furnished, in such rich 
abundance, the remains of other land animals. It is true that 
the remains of apes are also very rare, and we may well sup- 
pose that the superior intelligence of man led him to avoid that 
extensive destruction by flood or in morass which seems to have 
often overwhelmed other animals. Yet, when we consider that 
even in our own day men are not unfrequently overwhelmed by 
volcanic eruptions, as in Java and Japan, or carried away in vast 
numbers by floods, as in Bengal and China, it seems impossible 
but that ample remains of Miocene and Pliocene man do exist 
buried in the most recent layers of the earth's crust, and that 
more extended research or some fortunate discovery will some 
day bring them to light. 

It has usually been considered that the ancestral form of man 
originated in the tropics, where vegetation is most abundant and 
the climate most equable. But there are some important objec- 
tions to this view. The anthropoid apes, as well as most of the 
monkey tribe, are essentially arboreal in their structure, whereas 
the great distinctive character of man is his special adaptation 
to terrestrial locomotion. We can hardly suppose, therefore, 
that he originated in a forest region, where fruits to be obtained 
by cHmbing are the chief vegetable food. It is more probable 
that he began his existence on the open plains or high plateaus 
of the temperate or subtropical zone, where the seeds of in- 
digenous cereals and numerous herbivora, rodents, and game 
birds, with fishes and mollusks in the lakes, rivers, and seas 
supplied him with an abundance of varied food. In such a 
region he would develop skill as a hunter, trapper, or fisherman, 
and later as a herdsman and cultivator, — a succession of which we 
find indications in the paleolithic and neolithic races of Europe. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 253 

In seeking to determine the particular areas in which his 
earliest traces are likely to be found, we are restricted to some 
portion of the Eastern Hemisphere, where alone the anthropoid 
apes exist, or have apparently ever existed. 

There is good reason to believe, also, that Africa must be ex- 
cluded, because it is known to have been separated from the 
northern continent in early Tertiary times, and to have acquired 
its existing fauna of the higher mammalia by a later union with 
that continent after the separation from it of Madagascar, an 
island which has preserved for us a sample, as it were, of the 
early African mammalian fauna, from which not only the anthro- 
poid apes, but all the higher quadrumana are absent.^ There 
remains only the great Euro- Asiatic continent ; and its enor- 
mous plateaus, extending from Persia right across Tibet and 
Siberia to Manchuria, afford an area, some part or other of 
which probably offered suitable conditions, in late Miocene or 
early Pliocene times, for the development of ancestral man. 

It is in this area that we still find that type of mankind — 
the Mongolian — which retains a color of the skin midway be- 
tween the black or brown-black of the negro, and the ruddy or 
olive-white of the Caucasian types, a color which still prevails 
over all Northern Asia, over the American continents, and over 
much of Polynesia. From this primary tint arose, under the 
influence of varied conditions, and probably in correlation with 
constitutional changes adapted to peculiar climates, the varied 
tints which still exist among mankind. If the reasoning by 
which this conclusion is reached be sound, and all the earlier 
stages of man's development from an animal form occurred in 
the area now indicated, we can better understand how it is 
that we have as yet met with no traces of the missing links, or 
even of man's existence during late Tertiary times, because no 
part of the world is so entirely unexplored by the geologist as 
this very region. The area in question is sufficiently extensive 
and varied to admit of primeval man having attained to a con- 

' For a full discussion of this question, see the author's Geographical Dis- 
tribution of Animals, vol. i, p. 285. 



254 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

siderable population, and having developed his full human char- 
acteristics, both physical and mental, before there was any need 
for him to migrate beyond its limits. One of these earliest im- 
portant migrations was probably into Africa, where, spreading 
westward, he became modified in color and hair in correlation 
with physiological changes adapting him to the climate of the 
equatorial lowlands. Spreading northwestward into Europe 
the moist and cool climate led to a modification of an opposite 
character, and thus may have arisen the three great human types 
which still exist. Somewhat later, probably, he spread east- 
ward into Northwest America and soon scattered himself over 
the whole continent; and all this may well have occurred in 
early or middle Pliocene times. Thereafter, at very long inter- 
vals, successive waves of migration carried him into every part 
of the habitable world, and by conquest and intermixture led 
ultimately to that puzzling gradation of types which the eth- 
nologist in vain seeks to unravel. 

From the foregoing discussion it will be seen that I fully ac- 
cept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's 
bodily structure with that of the higher mammaHa, and his de- 
scent from some ancestral form common to man and the an- 
thropoid apes. The evidence of such descent appears to me to 
be overwhelming and conclusive. Again, as to the cause and 
method of such descent and modification, we may admit, at all 
events provisionally, that the laws of variation and natural selec- 
tion, acting through the struggle for existence and the continual 
need of more perfect adaptation to the physical and biological 
environments, may have brought about, first that perfection of 
bodily structure in which he is so far above all other animals, 
and in coordination with it the larger and more developed brain, 
by means of which he has been able to utilize that structure in 
the more and more complete subjection of the whole animal and 
vegetable kingdoms to his service. 

But this is only the beginning of Mr. Darwin's work, since he 
goes on to discuss the moral nature and mental faculties of man, 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 255 

and derives these too by gradual modification and development 
from the lower animals. Although, perhaps, nowhere distinctly- 
formulated, his whole argument tends to the conclusion that 
man's entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intel- 
lectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in 
the lower animals, in the same manner and by the action of 
the same general laws as his physical structure has been derived. 
As this conclusion appears to me not to be supported by adequate 
evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained 
facts, I propose to devote a brief space to its discussion. 

Mr. Darwin's mode of argument consists in showing that the 
rudiments of most, if not of all, the mental and moral faculties 
of man can be detected in some animals. The manifestations of 
intelligence, amounting in some cases to distinct acts of reason- 
ing, in many animals, are adduced as exhibiting in a much less 
degree the intelligence and reason of man. Instances of curi- 
osity, imitation, attention, wonder, and memory are given ; 
while examples are also adduced which may be interpreted as 
proving that animals exhibit kindness to their fellows, or mani- 
fest pride, contempt, and shame. Some are said to have the 
rudiments of language, because they utter several different 
sounds, each of which has a definite meaning to their fellows or 
to their young ; others the rudiments of arithmetic, because they 
seem to count and remember up to three, four, or even five. A 
sense of beauty is imputed to them on account of their own bright 
colors or the use of colored objects in their nests ; while dogs, 
cats, and horses are said to have imagination, because they ap- 
pear to be disturbed by dreams. Even some distant approach 
to the rudiments of religion is said to be found in the deep love 
and complete submission of a dog to his master.^ 

Turning from animals to man, it is shown that in the lowest 

savages many of these faculties are very little advanced from the 

condition in which they appear in the higher animals; while 

others, although fairly well exhibited, are yet greatly inferior to 

1 For a full discussion of all these points, see Descent of Man, chap. iii. 



256 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

the point of development they have reached in civilized races. 
In particular, the moral sense is said to have been developed 
from the social instincts of savages, and to depend mainly on the 
enduring discomfort produced by any action which excites the 
general disapproval of the tribe. Thus, every act of an individ- 
ual which is believed to be contrary to the interests of the tribe, 
excites its unvarying disapprobation and is held to be immoral ; 
while every act, on the other hand, which is, as a rule, beneficial 
to the tribe, is warmly and constantly approved, and is thus con- 
sidered to be right or moral. From the mental struggle, when an 
act that would benefit self is injurious to the tribe, there arises 
conscience ; and thus the social instincts are the foundation of 
the moral sense and of the fundamental principles of moraUty.^ 

The question of the origin and nature of the moral sense and of 
conscience is far too vast and complex to be discussed here, and a 
reference to it has been introduced only to complete the sketch of 
Mr. Darwin's view of the continuity and gradual development of 
all human faculties from the lower animals up to saVages, and 
from savage up to civilized man. The point to which I wish spe- 
cially to call attention is, that to prove continuity and the pro- 
gressive development of the intellectual and moral faculties from 
animals to man, is not the same as pro\dng that these faculties 
have been developed by natural selection ; and this last is what 
Mr. Darwin has hardly attempted, although to support his the- 
ory it was absolutely essential to prove it. Because man's physi- 
cal structure has been developed from an animal form by natural 
selection, it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature, 
even though developed pari passu ^ with it, has been developed by 
the same causes only. 

To illustrate by a physical analogy. Upheaval and depression 
of land, combined with subaerial denudation by wind and frost, 
rain and rivers, and marine denudation on coast lines, were long 
thought to account for all the modeling of the earth's surface not 
directly due to volcanic action ; and in the early editions of 
Lyell's Principles of Geology these are the sole causes appealed to. 

1 Descent of Man, chap. iv. 2 Simultaneously. — Editors. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 257 

But when the action of glaciers was studied and the recent occur- 
rence of a Glacial epoch demonstrated as a fact, many phenomena 
— such as moraines and other gravel deposits, bowlder clay, 
erratic bowlders, grooved and rounded rocks, and Alpine lake 
basins — were seen to be due to this altogether distinct cause. 
There was no breach of continuity, no sudden catastrophe ; the 
cold period came on and passed away in the most gradual manner, 
and its effects often passed insensibly into those produced by 
denudation or upheaval ; yet none the less a new agency ap- 
peared at a definite time, and new effects were produced which, 
though continuous with preceding effects, were not due to the 
same causes. It is not, therefore, to be assumed, without proof 
or against independent evidence, that the later stages of an ap- 
parently continuous development are necessarily due to the 
same causes only as the earlier stages. Applying this argument 
to the case of man's intellectual and moral nature, I propose to 
show that certain definite portions of it could not have been de- 
veloped by variation and natural selection alone, and that, there- 
fore, some other influence, law, or agency is required to account 
for them. If this can be clearly shown for any one or more of the. 
special faculties of intellectual man, we shall be justified in as- 
suming that the same unknown cause or power may have had a 
much wider influence, and may have profoundly influenced the 
whole course of his development. 

We have ample evidence that, in all the lower races of man, 
what may be termed the mathematical faculty is either absent, 
or, if present, quite unexercised. The Bushmen and the Brazil- 
ian Wood-Indians are said not to count beyond two. Many 
Australian tribes only have words for one and two, which are com- 
bined to make three, four, five, or six, beyond which they do not 
count. The Damaras of South Africa only count to three ; and 
Mr. Galton gives a curious description of how one of them was 
hopelessly puzzled when he had sold two sheep for two sticks of 
tobacco each, and received four sticks in payment. He could 
only find out that he was correctly paid by taking two sticks and 



258 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

then giving one sheep, then receiving two sticks more and giving 
the other sheep. Even the comparatively intellectual Zulus can 
only count up to ten by using the hands and fingers. The Ahts 
of Northwest America count in nearly the same manner, and 
most of the tribes of South America are no further advanced.^ 
The Kaffirs have great herds of cattle, and if one is lost they miss 
it immediately, but this is not by counting, but by noticing the 
absence of one they know ; just as in a large family or a school a 
boy is niissed without going through the process of counting. 
Somewhat higher races, as the Eskimos, can count up to 
twenty by using the hands and the feet ; and other races get even 
further than this by saying "one man" for twenty, "two men" 
for forty, and so on, equivalent to our rural mode of reckoning by 
scores. From the fact that so many of the existing savage races 
can only count to four or five. Sir John Lubbock thinks it im- 
probable that our earliest ancestors could have counted as high 
as ten.^ 

When we turn to the more civilized races, we find the use of 
numbers and the art of counting greatly extended. Even the 
Tongas of the South Sea islands are said to have been able to 
count as high as 100,000. But mere counting does not imply 
either the possession or the use of anything that can be really 
called the mathematical faculty, the exercise of which in any 
broad sense has only been possible since the introduction of the 
decimal notation. The Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the 
Jews, and the Chinese had all such cumbrous systems that any- 
thing like a science of arithmetic, beyond very simple operations, 

' Lubbock's Origin of Civilization, fourth edition, pp. 434-440; Tylor's 
-^,^imitive Culture, chap. vii. 

^ It has been recently stated that some of these facts are erroneous, and 
that some Austrahans can keep accurate reckoning up to 100, or more, when 
required. But this does not alter the general fact that many low races, in- 
cluding the Australians, have no words for high numbers and never require 
to use them. If they are now, with a little practice, able to count much 
higher, this indicates the possession of a faculty which could not have been 
developed under the law of utility only, since the absence of words for such 
high numbers shows that they were neither used nor required. 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 259 

was impossible ; and the Roman system, by which the year 1888 
would be written MDCCCLXXXVIII, was that in common use 
in Europe down to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and 
even much later in some places. Algebra, which was invented 
by the Hindus, from whom also came the decimal notation, was 
not introduced into Europe till the thirteenth century, although 
the Greeks had some acquaintance with it ; and it reached West- 
ern Europe from Italy only in the sixteenth century. It was, 
no doubt, owing to the absence of a sound system of numeration 
that the mathematical talent of the Greeks was directed chiefly 
to geometry, in which science Euclid, Archimedes, and others 
made such brilliant discoveries. It is, however, during the last 
three centuries only that the civilized world appears to have be- 
come conscious of the possession of a marvelous faculty which, 
when suppHed with the necessary tools in the decimal notation, 
the elements of algebra and geometry, and the power of rapidly 
communicating discoveries and ideas by the art of printing, has 
developed to an extent, the full grandeur of wliich can be appre- 
ciated only by those who have devoted some time (even if unsuc- 
cessfully) to the study. 

The facts now set forth as to the almost total absence of 
mathematical faculty in savages and its wonderful development 
in quite recent^ times are exceedingly suggestive, and in regard 
to them we are limited to two possible theories. Either pre- 
historic and savage man did not possess this faculty at all (or 
only in its merest rudiments) ; or they did possess it, but had 
neither the means nor tl^e incitements for its exercise. In the 
former case we have to ask by what means has this faculty been 
so rapidly developed in all civilized races, many of which a few 
centuries back were, in this respect, almost savages themselves ; 
while in the latter case the difficulty is still greater, for we have to 
assume the existence of a faculty which had never been used 
either by the supposed possessors of it or by their ancestors. 

Let us take, then, the least difficult supposition — that savages 
possessed only the mere rudiments of the faculty, such as their 
ability to count, sometimes up to ten, but with an utter inability 



26o ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

to perform the very simplest processes of arithmetic or of geom- 
etry — and inquire how this rudimentary faculty became rapidly 
developed into that of a Newton, a La Place, a Gauss, or a Cay- 
ley. We will admit that there is every possible gradation be- 
tween these extremes, and that there has been perfect continuity 
in the development of the faculty; but we ask. What motive 
power caused its development ? 

It must be remembered we are here dealing solely with the 
capability of the Darwinian theory to account for the origin of 
the mind, as well as it accounts for the origin of the body of man, 
and we must, therefore, recall the essential features of that the- 
ory. These are, the preservation of useful variations in the 
struggle for life ; that no creature can be improved beyond its 
necessities for the time being ; that the law acts by life and death, 
and by the survival of the fittest. We have to ask, therefore, 
what relation the successive stages of improvement of the mathe- 
matical faculty had to the life or death of its possessors ; to the 
struggles of tribe with tribe, or nation with nation ; or to the ulti- 
mate survival of one race and the extinction of another. If it 
cannot possibly have had any such effects, then it cannot have 
been produced by natural selection. 

It is evident that in the struggles of savage man with the ele- 
ments and with wild beasts, or of tribe with tribe, this faculty 
can have had no influence. It had nothing to do mth the early 
migrations of man, or with the conquest and extermination of 
weaker by more powerful peoples. The Greeks did not success- 
fully resist the Persian invaders by any aid from their few mathe- 
maticians, but by military training, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. 
The barbarous conquerors of the East, Timurlane and Gengkhis 
Khan, did not owe their success to any superiority of intellect or 
of mathematical faculty in themselves or their followers. Even 
if the great conquests of the Romans were, in part, due to their 
systematic military organization, and to their skill in making 
roads and encampments, which may, perhaps, be imputed to 
some exercise of the mathematical faculty, that did not prevent 
them from being conquered in turn by barbarians, in whom it 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 261 

was almost entirely absent. And if we take the most civilized 
peoples of the ancient world — the Hindus, the Arabs, the 
Greeks, and the Romans, all of whom had some amount of mathe- 
matical talent — we find that it is not these, but the descendants 
of the barbarians of those days — the Celts, the Teutons, and the 
Slavs — who have proved themselves the fittest to survive in the 
great struggle of races, although we cannot trace their steadily 
growing success during past centuries either to the possession of 
any exceptional mathematical faculty or to its exercise. They 
have indeed proved themselves, to-day, to be possessed of a mar- 
velous endowment of the mathematical faculty ; but their suc- 
cess at home and abroad, as colonists or as conquerors, as individ- 
uals or as nations, can in no way be traced to this faculty, since 
they were almost the last who devoted themselves to its exercise. 
We conclude, then, that the present gigantic development of the 
mathematical faculty is wholly unexplained by the theory of nat- 
ural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause. 

These distinctively human faculties follow very closely the 
lines of the mathematical faculty in their progressive develop- 
ment, and serve to enforce the same argument. Among the lower 
savages music, as we understand it, hardly exists, though they 
all delight in rude musical sounds, as of drums, tom-toms, or 
gongs; and they also sing in monotonous chants. Almost ex- 
actly as they advance in general intellect, and in the arts of 
social life, their appreciation of music appears to rise in propor- 
tion ; and we find among them rude stringed instruments and 
whistles, till, in Java, we have regiilar bands of skilled performers, 
probably the successors of Hindu musicians of the age before the 
Mohammedan conquest. The Egyptians are believed to have 
been the earUest musicians, and from them the Jews and the 
Greeks, no doubt, derived their knowledge of the art ; but it 
seems to be admitted that neither the latter nor the Romans 
knew anything of harmony or of the essential features of mod- 
ern music. Till the fifteenth century little progress appears to 
have been made in the science or the practice of music; but 



262 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

since that era it has advanced with marvelous rapidity, its prog- 
ress being curiously parallel with that of mathematics, inasmuch 
as great musical geniuses appeared suddenly among different 
nations, equal in their possession of this special faculty to any 
that have since arisen. 

As with the mathematical, so with the musical faculty, it is im- 
possible to trace any connection between its possession and sur- 
vival in the struggle for existence. It seems to have arisen as a 
result of social and intellectual advancement, not as a cause; and 
there is some evidence that it is latent in the lower races, since 
under European training native militar}'^ bands have been formed 
in many parts of the world, which have been able to perform 
creditably the best modern music. 

The artistic faculty has run a somewhat different course, 
though analogous to that of the faculties already discussed. 
Most savages exhibit some rudiments of it, either in drawing or 
carving human or animal figures ; but, almost without exception, 
these figures are rude and such as would be executed by the 
ordinary inartistic child. In fact, modern savages are, in this 
respect, hardly equal to those prehistoric men who represented 
the mammoth and the reindeer on pieces of horn or bone. With 
any advance in the arts of social life, we have a corresponding ad- 
vance in artistic skill and taste, rising very high in the art of 
Japan and India, but culminating in the marvelous sculpture of 
the best period of Grecian history. In the Middle Ages art was 
chiefly manifested in ecclesiastical architecture and the illumina- 
tion of manuscripts, but from the thirteenth to the fifteenth 
centuries pictorial art revived in Italy and attained to a degree 
of perfection which has never been surpassed. This revival was 
followed closely by the schools of Germany, the Netherlands, 
Spain, France, and England, showing that the true artistic fac- 
ulty belonged to no one nation, but was fairly distributed among 
the various European races. 

These several developments of the artistic faculty, whether 
manifested in sculpture, painting, or architecture, are evidently 
outgrowths of the human intellect which have no immediate 



\ 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 263 

influence on the survival of individuals or of tribes, or on the suc- 
cess of nations in their struggles for supremacy or for existence. 
The glorious art of Greece did not prevent the nation from falling 
under the sway of the less advanced Roman ; while we ourselves, 
among whom art was the latest to arise, have taken the lead in 
the colonization of the world, thus proving our mixed race to be 
the fittest to survive. 

The law of Natural Selection or the survival of the fittest is, as 
its name implies, a rigid law, which acts by the life or death of 
the individuals submitted to its action. From its very nature it 
can act only on useful or hurtful characteristics, eliminating the 
latter and keeping up the former to a fairly general level of effi- 
ciency. Hence it necessarily follows that the characters devel- 
oped by its means will be present in all the individuals of a species, 
and, though varying, will not vary very widely from a common 
standard. The amount of variation we found, in our third 
chapter, to be about one fifth or one sixth of the mean value — 
that is, if the mean value were taken at 100, the variations would 
reach from 80 to 120, or somewhat more, if very large numbers 
were compared. In accordance with this law we find that all 
those characters in man which were certainly essential to him 
during his early stages of development exist in all savages with 
some approach to equality. In the speed of running, in bodily 
strength, in skill with weapons, in acuteness of vision, or in power 
of following a trail, all are fairly proficient, and the differences 
of endowment do not probably exceed the limits of variation in 
animals above referred to. So, in animal instinct or intelligence, 
we find the same general level of development. Every wren 
makes a fairly good nest like its fellows ; every fox has an average 
amount of the sagacity of its race ; while all the higher birds and 
mammals have the necessary affections and instincts needful for 
the protection and bringing up of their offspring. 

But in those specially developed faculties of civilized man 
which we have been considering, the case is very different. 
They exist only in a small proportion of individuals, while the 



264 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

difference of capacity between these favored individuals and the 
average of mankind is enormous. Taking first the mathematical 
faculty, probably fewer than one in a hundred really possess it, 
the great bulk of the population having no natural ability for 
the study, or feeling the slightest interest in it. And if we at- 
tempt to measure the amount of variation in the faculty itself 
between a first-class mathematician and the ordinary run of 
people who find any kind of calculation confusing and altogether 
devoid of interest, it is probable that the former could not be 
estimated at less than a hundred times the latter, and perhaps a 
thousand times would more nearly measure the difference be- 
tween them. 

The artistic faculty appears to agree pretty closely with the 
mathematical in its frequency. The boys and girls who, going 
beyond the mere conventional designs of children, draw what 
they see, not what they know to be the shape of things ; who nat- 
urally sketch in perspective, because it is thus they see objects ; 
who see, and represent in their sketches, the light and shade as 
well as the mere outlines of objects ; and who can draw recogniz- 
able sketches of every one they know, are certainly very few com- 
pared with those who are totally incapable of anything of the 
kind. From some inquiries I have made in schools, and from 
my own observation, I believe that those who are endowed with 
this natural artistic talent do not exceed, even if they come up to, 
one per cent of the whole population. 

The variations in the amount of artistic faculty are certainly 
very great, even if we do not take the extremes. The grada- 
tions of power between the ordinary man or woman "who does 
not draw," and whose attempts at representing any object, ani- 
mate or inanimate, would be laughable, and the average good 
artist who, with a few bold strokes, can produce a recognizable 
and even effective sketch of a landscape, a street, or an animal, 
are very numerous ; and we can hardly measure the difference 
between them at less than fifty or a hundred fold. 

The musical faculty is undoubtedly, in its lower forms, less un- 
common than either of the preceding, but it still differs essen- 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 265 

tially from the necessary or useful faculties in that it is almost 
entirely wanting in one half even of civilized men. For every 
person who draws, as it were instinctively, there are probably 
five or ten who sing or play without having been taught and from 
mere innate love and perception of melody and harmony.^ On 
the other hand, there are probably about as many who seem ab- 
solutely deficient in musical perception, who take little pleasure 
in it, who cannot perceive discords or remember tunes, and who 
could not learn to sing or play with any amount of study. The 
gradations, too, are here quite as great as in mathematics or 
pictorial art, and the special faculty of the great musical composer 
must be reckoned many hundreds or perhaps thousands of times 
greater than that of the ordinary "unmusical" person above re- 
ferred to. 

It appears then, that, both on account of the limited number of 
persons gifted with the mathematical, the artistic, or the musical 
faculty, as well as from the enormous variations in its development, 
these mental powers differ widely from those which are essential 
to man, and are, for the most part, common to him and the 
lower animals ; and that they could not, therefore, possibly have 
been developed in him by means of the law of natural selection. 

We have thus shown, by two distinct Hnes of argument, that 
faculties are developed in civilized man which, both in their 
mode of origin, their function, and their variations, are altogether 
distinct from those other characters and faculties which are es- 
sential to him, and which have been brought to their actual 
state of efficiency by the necessities of his existence. And be- 
sides the three which have been specially referred to, there are 
others which evidently belong to the same class. Such is the 
metaphysical faculty, which enables us to form abstract concep- 
tions of a kind the most remote from all practical applications, 
to discuss the ultimate causes of things, the nature and qualities 
of matter, motion, and force, of space and time, of cause and 

1 I am informed, however, by a music master in a large school that only 
about one per cent have real or decided musical talent, corresponding curi- 
ously with the estimate of the mathematicians. 



266 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

effect, of will and conscience. Speculations on these abstract 
and difficult questions are impossible to savages, who seem to 
have no mental faculty enabhng them to grasp the essential 
ideas or conceptions ; yet whenever any race attains to civiliza- 
tion, and comprises a body of people who, whether as priests or 
philosophers, are reheved from the necessity of labor or of 
taking an active part in war or government, the metaphysical 
faculty appears to spring suddenly into existence, although, like 
the other faculties we have referred to, it is always confined to a 
very limited proportion of the population. 

In the same class we may place the peculiar faculty of wit and 
humor, an altogether natural gift whose development appears 
to be parallel with that of the other exceptional faculties. Like 
them, it is almost unknown among savages, but appears more 
or less frequently as civilization advances and the interests of 
life become more numerous and more complex. Like them, too, 
it is altogether removed from utility in the struggle for life, and 
appears sporadically in a very small percentage of the popula- 
tion ; the majority being, as is well known, totally unable to say 
a witty thing or make a pun even to save their Uves. 

The facts now set forth prove the existence of a number of 
mental faculties which either do not exist at all or exist in a very 
rudimentary condition in savages, but appear almost suddenly 
and in perfect development in the higher civilized races. These 
same faculties are further characterized by their sporadic charac- 
ter, being well developed only in a very small proportion of the 
community ; and by the enormous amount of variation in their 
development, the higher manifestations of them being many 
times — perhaps a hundred or a thousand times — stronger than 
the lower. Each of these characteristics is totally inconsistent 
with any action of the law of natural selection in the production 
of the faculties referred to ; and the facts, taken in their entirety, 
compel us to recognize some origin for them wholly distinct from 
that which has served to account for the animal characteristics 
— whether bodily or mental — of man. 






DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 267 

The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to 
the existence in man of something which he has not derived from 
his animal progenitors — something which we may best refer to 
as being of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive 
development under favorable conditions. On the hypothesis 
of this spiritual nature, superadded to the animal nature of man, 
we are able to understand much that is otherwise mysterious or 
unintelUgible in regard to him, especially the enormous influence 
of ideas, principles, and beliefs over his whole life and actions. 
Thus alone we can understand the constancy of the martyr, the 
unselfishness of the philanthropist, the devotion of the patriot, 
the enthusiasm of the artist, and the resolute and persevering 
search of the scientific worker after nature's secrets. Thus we 
may perceive that the love of truth, the delight in beauty, the 
passion for justice, and the thrill of exultation with which we 
hear of any act of courageous self-sacrifice, are the workings 
within us of a higher nature which has not been developed by 
means of the struggle for material existence. 

It will, no doubt, be urged that the admitted continuity of 
man's progress from the brute does not admit of the introduction 
of new causes, and that we have no evidence of the sudden change 
of nature which such introduction would bring about. The 
fallacy as to new causes involving any breach of continuity, or 
any sudden or abrupt change, in the effects, has already been 
shown ; but we will further point out that there are at least 
three stages in the development of the organic world when some 
new cause or power must necessarily have come into action. 

The first stage is the change from inorganic to organic, when 
the earliest vegetable cell, or the living protoplasm out of which 
it arose, first appeared. This is often imputed to a mere increase 
of complexity of chemical compounds ; but increase of com- 
plexity, with consequent instability, even if we admit that it 
may have produced protoplasm as a chemical compound, could 
certainly not have produced living protoplasm — protoplasm 
which has the power of growth and of reproduction, and of that 
continuous process of development which has resulted in the 



268 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

marvelous variety and complex organization of the whole vege- 
table kingdom. There is in all this something quite beyond and 
apart from chemical changes, however complex ; and it has been 
well said that the first vegetable cell was a new thing in the world, 
possessing altogether new powers — that of extracting and fixing 
carbon from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere, that of indefi- 
nite reproduction, and, still more marvelous, the power of varia- 
tion and of reproducing those variations, till endless complica- 
tions of structure and varieties of form have been the result. 
Here, then, we have indications of a new power at work, which 
we may term vitality, since it gives to certain forms of matter 
all those characters and properties which constitute Life. 

The next stage is still more marvelous, still more completely 
beyond all possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and 
forces. It is the introduction of sensation or consciousness, con- 
stituting the fundamental distinction between the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms. Here all idea of mere complication of 
structure producing the residt is out of the question. We feel it 
to be altogether preposterous to assume that at a certain stage of 
complexity of atomic constitution, and as a necessary result of 
that complexity alone, an ego should start into existence, a thing 
that feels, that is conscious of its own existence. Here we have 
the certainty that something new has arisen, a being whose nas- 
cent consciousness has gone on increasing in power and definite- 
ness tUl it has culminated in the higher animals. No verbal ex- 
planation or attempt at explanation — such as the statement 
that life is the residt of the molecular forces of the protoplasm, or 
that the whole existing organic universe from the amoeba up to 
man was latent in the fire-mist from which the solar system was 
developed — can afford any mental satisfaction, or help us in 
any way to a solution of the mystery. 

The third stage is, as we have seen, the existence in man of a 
number of his most characteristic and noblest faculties, those 
which raise him furthest above the brutes and open up possibili- 
ties of almost indefinite advancement. These faculties could 
not possibly have been developed by means of the same laws 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 269 

which have determined the progressive development of the or- 
ganic world in general, and also of man's physical organism.^ 

These three distinct stages of progress from the inorganic 
world of matter and motion up to man, point clearly to an unseen 
universe — to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is 
altogether subordinate. To this spiritual world we may refer 
the marvelously complex forces which we know as gravitation, 
cohesion, chemical force, radiant force, and electricity, without 
which the material universe could not exist for a moment in its 
present form, and perhaps not at all, since without these forces, 
and perhaps others which may be termed atomic, it is doubtful 
whether matter itself could have any existence. And still more 
surely can we refer to it those progressive manifestations of Life 
in the vegetable, the animal, and man — which we may classify 
as unconscious, conscious, and intellectual life, — and which 
probably depend upon different degrees of spiritual influx. I 
have already shown that this involves no necessary infraction of 
the law of continuity in physical or mental evolution ; whence it 
follows that any difiiculty we may find in discriminating the 
inorganic from the organic, the lower vegetable from the lower 
animal organisms, or the higher animals from the lowest types 
of man, has no bearing at all upon the question. This is to be 
decided by showing that a change in essential nature (due, prob- 
ably, to causes of a higher order than those of the material uni- 
verse) took place at the several stages of progress which I have 
indicated; a change which may be none the less real because 
absolutely imperceptible at its point of origin, as is the change 
that takes place in the curve in which a body is moving when the 
apphcation of some new force causes the curve to be slightly 
altered. 

Those who admit my interpretation of the evidence now ad- 
duced — strictly scientific evidence in its appeal to facts which 
are clearly what ought not to be on the materialistic theory — will 

1 For an earlier discussion of this subject, with some wider applications, see 
the author's Conlrlhulions to the Theory of Natural Selection, chap. x. 



270 ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE 

be able to accept the spiritual nature of man, as not in any way 
inconsistent with the theory of evolution, but as dependent on 
those fundamental laws and causes which furnish the very mate- 
rials for evolution to work with. They will also be relieved from 
the crushing mental burden imposed upon those who — main- 
taining that we, in common with the rest of nature, are but prod- 
ucts of the bhnd eternal forces of the universe, and believing 
also that the time must come when the sun will lose his heat and 
all life on the earth necessarily cease — have to contemplate a not 
very distant future in which all this glorious earth — which for un- 
told millions of years has been slowly developing forms of life and 
beauty to culminate at last in man — shall be as if it had never 
existed ; who are compelled to suppose that all the slow growths 
of our race struggling towards a higher life, all the agony of 
martyrs, all the groans of victims, all the evil and misery and 
undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles for freedom, 
all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations for virtue and 
the well-being of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and, "like 
the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind." 

As contrasted with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, 
who accept the existence of a spirtual world, can look upon the 
universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to 
the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and 
perfectibility. To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d^etre 
of the world — with all its complexities of physical structure, 
with its grand geological progress, the slow evolution of the 
vegetable and animal kingdoms, and the ultimate appearance of 
man — was the development of the human spirit in association 
with the human body. From the fact that the spirit of man — 
the man himself — is so developed, we may well believe that this 
is the only, or at least the best, way for its development ; and 
we may even see in what is usually termed "evil" on the earth, 
one of the most efficient means of its growth. For we know that 
the noblest faculties of man are strengthened and perfected by 
struggle and effort ; it is by unceasing warfare against physical 
evils and in the midst of difficulty and danger that energy, cour- 



I 



DARWINISM AS APPLIED TO MAN 271 

age, self-reliance, and industry have become the common quali- 
ties of the northern races ; it is by the battle with moral evil in 
all its hydra-headed forms, that the still nobler qualities of 
justice and mercy and humanity and self-sacrifice have been 
steadily increasing in the world. Beings thus trained and strength- 
ened by their surroundings, and possessing latent faculties capa- 
ble of such noble development, are surely destined for a higher 
and more permanent existence; and we may confidently be- 
lieve with our greatest living poet — 

That life is not as idle ore, 

But iron dug from central gloom. 

And heated hot with burning fears, 
And dipt in baths of hissing tears. 

And batter'd with the shocks of doom 

To shape and use. ^ 

We thus find that the Darwinian theory, even when carried out 
to its extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose, but 
lends a decided support to, a belief in he spiritual nature of man. 
It shows us how man's body may have been developed from that 
of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection ; but 
it also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral faculties 
which could not have been so developed, but must have had an- 
other origin ; and for this origin we can only find an adequate 
cause in the unseen universe of Spirit. 

• ^ Tennyson's /« Memoriam, cxviii — Editors. 



X 

THE BELFAST ADDRESS 
John Tyndall 

[John Tyndall (1820-1893) holds a position of great fame and importance 
in the field of investigative science. In his youth he was largely self-educated, 
and held early positions as surveyor, engineer, and teacher of mathematics. 
His advanced studies were pursued at Marburg, where he worked with tre- 
mendous energy, but under straitened financial circumstances. Tyndall's 
general note probably dated from the period of the publication of his Glaciers 
of the Alps, 1857-1859, which represented the results of an investigative ex- 
cursion to Switzerland in company with Huxley. From this time on, he rap- 
idly gained popularity as a writer and lecturer on scientific topics. It is a 
mistake, however, to regard Tyndall as merely a popularizer of science, for 
his investigations, which were both extensive and minute, are numbered 
among the most important contributions of his century to geological, chem- 
ical, meteorological, and physical science. 

The so-called Belfast Address was delivered as Tyndall's inaugural address 
at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at 
Belfast in 1874, and was published in the Popidar Science Monthly in the 
same year. This address, an imposing reminder that science and Hterary 
art are not inevitably unrelated, reviews the history of ancient and modern 
efforts to develop an explanation of physical and spiritual existence from the 
evidence of scientific observation, as opposed to the assumptions of religious 
tradition. As a frank challenge to the adherents of a literal interpretation 
of biblical tradition, the Belfast Address brought down upon Tyndall the full 
blast of polemical fire that had been smoldering angrily since 1859, when 
the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species first brought forward conclu- 
sive justification for the free criticism of dogmatic theology. Tyndall's 
position in this controversy may be found in his Fragvients of Science.] 

An impulse inherent in primeval man turned his thoughts and 
questionings betimes toward the sources of natural phenomena. 
The same impulse, inherited and intensified, is the spur of scien- 
tific action to-day. Determined by it, by a process of abstraction 

272 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 273 

from experience we form physical theories which lie beyond the 
pale of experience, but which satisfy the desire of the mind to see 
every natural occurrence resting upon a cause. In forming 
their notions of the origin of things, our earliest historic (and 
doubtless, we inight add, our prehistoric) ancestors pursued, as 
far as their intelligence permitted, the same course. They also 
fell back upon experience, but with this difference — that the 
particular experiences which furnished the weft and woof of 
their theories were drawn, not from the study of nature, but from 
what lay much closer to them, the observation of men. Their 
theories accordingly took an anthropomorphic form. To su- 
persensual beings, which, "however potent and invisible, were 
nothing but a species of human creatures, perhaps raised from 
among mankind, and retaining all human passions and appe- 
tites," ^ were handed over the rule and governance of natural phe- 
nomena. 

Tested by observation and reflection, these early notions failed 
in the long run to satisfy the more penetrating intellects of our 
race. Far in the depths of history we find men of exceptional 
power differentiating themselves from the crowd, rejecting 
these anthropomorphic notions, and seeking to connect natural 
phenomena with their physical principles. But long prior to 
these purer effects of the understanding, the merchant had been 
abroad, and rendered the philosopher possible; commerce had 
been developed, wealth amassed, leisure for travel and for specu- 
lation secured, while races educated under different conditions, 
and therefore differently informed and endowed, had been stim- 
ulated and sharpened by mutual contact. In those regions 
where the commercial aristocracy of ancient Greece mingled 
with its Eastern neighbors, the sciences were born, being nurtured 
and developed by free-thinking and courageous men. The 
state of things to be displaced may be gathered from a passage 
of Euripides quoted by Hume. "There is nothing in the world ; 
no glory, no prosperity. The gods toss all into confusion ; mix 
everything with its reverse, that all of us, from our ignorance and 
1 Hume, Natural History of Religion. 



274 JOHN TYNDALL 

uncertainty, may pay them the more worship and reverence." 
Now, as science demands the radical extirpation of caprice, and 
the absolute reliance upon law in nature, there grew with the 
growth of scientific notions a desire and determination to sweep 
from the field of theory this mob of gods and demons, and to 
place natural phenomena on a basis more congruent with them- 
selves. 

The problem which had been previously approached from 
above was now attacked from below; theoretic effort passed 
from the super- to the sub-sensible. It was felt that to construct 
the universe in idea it was necessary to have some notion of its 
constituent parts — of what Lucretius subsequently called the 
"First Beginnings." Abstracting again from experience, the 
leaders of scientific speculation reached at length the pregnant 
doctrine of atoms and molecules, the latest developments of 
which were set forth with such power and clearness at the last 
meeting of the British Association. Thought, no doubt, had 
long hovered about this doctrine before it attained the precision 
and completeness which it assumed in the mind of Democritus,^ 
a philosopher who may well for a moment arrest our attention. 
"Few great men," says Lange, in his excellent History of Ma- 
terialism, a work to the spirit and the letter of which I am 
equally indebted, "have been so despitefully used by history as 
Democritus. In the distorted images sent down to us through 
unscientific traditions there remains of him almost nothing but 
the name of the 'laughing philosopher,' while figures of immeas- 
urably smaller significance spread themselves at full length 
before us." Lange speaks of Bacon's high appreciation of De- 
mocritus — for ample illustrations of which I am indebted to my 
excellent friend Mr. Spedding, the learned editor and biographer 
of Bacon. It is evident, indeed, that Bacon considered Democ- 
ritus to be a man of weightier metal than either Plato or Aris- 
totle, though their philosophy "was noised and celebrated in the 
schools, amid the din and pomp of professors." It was not they, 
but Genseric and Attila and the barbarians, who destroyed the 
* Born 460 B.C. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 275 

atomic philosophy. "For at a time when all human learning 
had suflfered shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and Platonic 
philosophy, as being of a lighter and more inflated substance, 
were preserved and come down to us, while things more solid 
sank and almost passed into oblivion." 

The principles enunciated by Democritus reveal his uncom- 
promising antagonism to those who deduced the phenomena of 
nature from the caprices of the gods. They are briefly these : 
I. From nothing comes nothing. Nothing that exists can be 
destroyed. All changes are due to the combination and sepa- 
ration of molecules. 2. Nothing happens by chance. Every 
occurrence has its cause from which it folloM's by necessity. 
3. The only existing things are the atoms and empty space ; all 
else is mere opinion. 4. The atoms are infinite in number, and 
infinitely various in form ; they strike together, and the lateral 
motions and whirlings which thus arise are the beginnings of 
worlds. 5. The varieties of all things depend upon the varieties 
of their atoms, in number, size, and aggregation. 6. The soul 
consists of free, smooth, round atoms, like those of fire. These 
are the most mobile of all. They interpenetrate the whole body, 
and in their motions the phenomena of life arise. Thus the 
atoms of Democritus are individually without sensation ; they 
combine in obedience to mechanical laws ; and not only organic 
forms, but the phenomena of sensation and thought, are also 
the result of their combination. 

That great enigma, "the exquisite adaptation of one part of 
an organism to another part, and to the conditions of life," 
more especially the construction of the human body, Democritus 
made no attempt to solve. Empedocles, a man of more fiery 
and poetic nature, introduced the notion of love and hate among 
the atoms to account for their combination and separation. 
Noticing this gap in the doctrine of Democritus, he struck in 
with the penetrating thought, linked, however, with some wild 
speculation, that it lay in the very nature of those combinations 
which were suited to their ends (in other words, in harmony with 
their environment) to maintain themselves, while unfit combina- 



276 JOHN TYXDALL 

tions, having no proper habitat, must rapidly disappear. Thus 
more than 2000 years ago the doctrine of the "sur\'ival of the 
fittest," which in our day, not on the basis of vague conjecture, 
but of positive knowledge, has been raised to such extraordinary 
significance, had received at all events partial enunciation.^ 

Epicurus,^ said to be the son of a poor schoolmaster at Samos, 
is the next dominant figure in the history of the atomic phi- 
losophy. He mastered the writings of Democritus, heard lec- 
tures in Athens, returned to Samos, and subsequently wandered 
through various countries. He finally returned to Athens, 
where he bought a garden, and surrounded himself by pupils, 
in the midst of whom he lived a pure and serene life, and died a 
peaceful death. His philosophy was alm^^st identical with that 
of Democritus ; but he never quoted either friend or foe. One 
main object of Epicurus was to free the world from superstition 
and the fear of death. Death he treated with indifference. It 
merely robs us of sensation. As long as we are, death is not ; 
and when death is, we are not. .Life has no more evil for him 
who has made up his mind that it is no evil not to live. He 
adored the gods, but not in the ordinary fashion. The idea of 
divine power, properly purified, he thought an elevating one. 
Still he taught, "Not he is godless who rejects the gods of the 
crowd, but rather he who accepts them." The gods were to 
him eternal and immortal beings, whose blessedness excluded 
every thought of care or occupation of any kind. Nature pur- 
sues her course in accordance with everlasting laws, the gods 
never interfering. They haunt 

The lucid interspace of world and world 
Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, 
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow, 
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans, 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
Their sacred everlasting calm. ' 

1 Lange, History of Materialism, 2d edit., p. 23. 

^ Born 342 B.C. 

^ Tennyson's Lucretius. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 277 

Lange considers the relation of Epicurus to the gods subjec- 
tive ; the indication probably of an ethical requirement of his 
own nature. We cannot read history with open eyes, or study 
human nature to its depths, and fail to discern such a require- 
ment. Man never has been and he never will be satisfied with 
the operations and products of the understanding alone ; hence 
physical science cannot cover all the demands of his nature. 
But the history of the efforts made to satisfy these demands 
might be broadly described as a history of errors — the error 
consisting in ascribing fixity to that which is fluent, which varies 
as we vary, being gross when we are gross, and becoming, as 
our capacities widen, more abstract and sublime. On one great 
point the mind of Epicurus was at peace. He neither sought nor 
expected, here or hereafter, any personal profit from his relation 
to the gods. And it is assuredly a fact that loftiness and serenity 
of thought may be promoted by conceptions which involve no 
idea of profit of this kind. "Did I not believe," said a great 
man to me once, "that an Intelligence is at the heart of things, 
my life on earth would be intolerable." The utterer of these 
words is not, in my opinion, rendered less noble, but more noble, 
by the fact that it was the need of ethical harmony here, and not 
the thought of personal profit hereafter, that prompted his 
observation. 

A century and a half after the death of Epicurus, Lucretius ^ 
wrote his great poem, "On the Nature of Things," in which he, 
a Roman, developed with extraordinary ardor the philosophy of 
his Greek predecessor. He wishes to win over his friend Mem- 
nius to the school of Epicurus ; and although he has no rewards 
in a future life to offer, although his object appears to be a purely 
negative one, he addresses his friend with the heat of an apostle. 
His object, like that of his great forerunner, is the destruction 
of superstition ; and considering that men trembled before 
every natural event as a direct monition from the gods, and that 
everlasting torture was also in prospect, the freedom aimed at 
by Lucretius might perhaps be deemed a positive good. "This 

' Born 99 B.C. 



278 JOHN TYNDALL 

terror," he says, "and darkness of mind must be dispelled, 
not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by 
the aspect and the law of nature." He refutes the notion that 
anything can come out of nothing, or that that which is once 
begotten can be recalled to nothing. The first beginnings, the 
atoms, are indestructible, and into them all things can be dis- 
solved at last. Bodies are partly atoms and partly combinations 
of atoms ; but the atoms nothing can quench. They are strong 
in solid singleness, and by their denser combination all things can 
be closely packed and exhibit enduring strength. He denies 
that matter is infinitely divisible. We come at length to the 
atoms, without which, as an imperishable substratum, all order 
in the generation and development of things would be destroyed. 
The mechanical shock of the atoms being in his view the all- 
sufficient cause of things, he combats the notion that the con- 
stitution of nature has been in any way determined by intelli- 
gent design. The interaction of the atoms throughout infinite 
time rendered all manner of combinations possible. Of these 
the fit ones persisted, while the unfit ones disappeared. Not 
after sage deliberation did the atoms station themselves in their 
right places, nor did they bargain what motions they should 
assume. From all eternity they have been driven together, 
and, after trying motions and unions of every kind, they fell 
at length into the arrangements out of which this system of 
things has been formed. His grand conception of the atoms 
falling silently through immeasurable ranges of space and time 
suggested the nebular hypothesis ^ to Kant, its first propounder. 
"If you will apprehend and keep in mind these things, nature, 
free at once, and rid of her haughty lords, is seen to do all things 
spontaneously, of herself, without the meddling of the gods."^ 

^ The theory that the stars and the planetary bodies have been evolved from 
diffused nebulous matter. — ■ Editors. 

2 Monro's translation [of Lucretius]. In his criticism of this work {Con- 
temporary Review, 1867) Dr. Hayman does not appear to be aware of the 
really sound and subtile observations on which the reasoning of Lucretius, 
though erroneous, sometimes rests. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 279 

During the centuries between the first of these three phi- 
losophers and the last, the human intellect was active in other 
fields than theirs. The Sophists had run through their career. 
At Athens had appeared the three men, Socrates, Plato, and 
Aristotle, whose yoke remains to some extent unbroken to 
the present hour. Within this period also the school of Alexan- 
dria was founded, Euclid wrote his Elements, and he and 
others made some advance in optics. Archimedes had pro- 
pounded the theory of the lever and the principles of hydro- 
statics. Pythagoras had made his experiments on the harmonic 
intervals, while astronomy was immensely enriched by the dis- 
coveries of Hipparchus, who was followed by the historically 
more celebrated Ptolemy. Anatomy had been made the basis of 
scientific medicine ; and it is said by Draper ^ that vivisection 
then began. In fact, the science of ancient Greece had already 
cleared the world of the fantastic images of divinities operating 
capriciously through natural phenomena. It had shaken itself 
free from that fruitless scrutiny "by the internal light of the 
mind alone," which had vainly sought to transcend experience 
and reach a knowledge of ultimate causes. Instead of accidental 
observation, it had introduced observation with a purpose; 
instruments were employed to aid the senses ; and scientific 
method was rendered in a great measure complete by the union 
of induction and experiment. 

What, then, stopped its victorious advance ? Why was the 
scientific intellect compelled, like an exhausted soil, to lie fallow 
for nearly two millenniums before it could regather the elements 
necessary to its fertility and strength ? Bacon has already 
let us know one cause ; Whewell ascribes this stationary period 
to four causes — obscurity of thought, servility, intolerance of 
disposition, enthusiasm of temper ; and he gives striking ex- 
amples of each.- But these characteristics must have had their 
causes, which lay in the circumstances of the time. Rome 
and the other cities of the empire had fallen into moral putre- 

^ History of the Inlelleclual Development of Europe, p. 295. 
" History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i. 



28o JOHN TYNDALL 

faction. Christianity had appeared, offering the Gospel to the 
poor, and, by moderation if not asceticism of life, practically 
protesting against the profligacy of the age. The sufferings of 
the early Christians, and the extraordinary exaltation of mind 
which enabled them to triumph over the diabolical tortures to 
which they were subjected,^ must have left traces not easily 
effaced. They scorned the earth, in view of that "building of 
God, that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." 
The Scriptures which ministered to their spiritual needs were 
also the measure of their science. When, for example, the 
celebrated question of antipodes came to be discussed, the Bible 
was with many the ultimate court of appeal. Augustine, who 
flourished a.d. 400, would not deny the rotundity of the earth, 
but he would deny the possible existence of inhabitants at the 
other side, "because no such race is recorded in Scripture among 
the descendants of Adam." Archbishop Boniface was shocked 
at the assumption of a "world of human beings out of the reach 
of the means of salvation." Thus reined in, science was not 
likely to make much progress. Later on, the political and the- 
ological strife between the Church and civil governments, so 
powerfully depicted by Draper, must have done much to stifle 
investigation. 

Whewell makes many wise and brave remarks regarding the ■ 
spirit of the Middle Ages. It was a menial spirit. The seekers 
after natural knowledge had forsaken that fountain of living 
waters, the direct appeal to nature by observation and experi- 
ment, and had given themselves up to the remanipulation of the 
notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had 
become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, 
as it always does in science, to intellectual death. Natural 
events, instead of being traced to physical, were referred to 
moral causes, while an exercise of the fantasy, almost as 
degrading as the Spiritualism of the present day, took the 
place of scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism 
of the Middle Ages, magic, alchemy, the Neoplatonic philoso- 
1 Depicted with terrible vividness in Renan's Antichrist. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 281 

phy/ with its visionary though sublime attractions, which caused 
men to look with shame upon their own bodies as hindrances to 
the absorption of the creature in the blessedness of the Creator. 
Finally came the scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to 
Lange, of the least mature notions of Aristotle with the Chris- 
tianity of the West. Intellectual immobility was the result. As 
a traveler without a compass in a fog may wander long, im- 
agining he is making way, and find himself, after hours of toil, 
at his starting-point, so the schoolmen, having tied and untied 
the same knots, and formed and dissipated the same clouds, 
found themselves at the end of centuries in their old position. 

With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the 
Middle Ages, and which, though to a less extent, he still wields, 
I would ask permission to make one remark. When the human 
mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of extraordinary 
power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with similar 
power in all other domains. Thus theologians have found com- 
fort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt with the 
question of revelation, forgetful of the fact that the very devotion 
of his powers, through all the best years of his life, to a totally 
different class of ideas, not to speak of any natural disqualifica- 
tion, tended to render him less instead of more competent to 
deal with theological and historic questions. Goethe, starting 
from his established greatness as a poet, and indeed from his 
positive discoveries in natural history, produced a profound 
impression among the painters of Germany when he published 
his Farbenlehre, in which he endeavored to overthrow New- 
ton's theory of colors. This theory he deemed so obviously 
absurd that he considered its author a charlatan, and attacked 
him with a corresponding vehemence of language. In the do- 
main of natural history Goethe had made really considerable 
discoveries ; and we have high authority for assuming that 
had he devoted himself wholly to that side of science, he might 
have reached in it an eminence comparable with that which he 

' Renaissance Neoplatonism was a revival of an Alexandrian modification 
of Plato's philosophy influenced in part by Christian teachings. — Editors. 



282 JOHN TYNDALL 



attained as a poet. In sharpness of observation, in the detection 
of analogies, however apparently remote, in the classification 
and organization of facts according to the analogies discerned, 
Goethe possessed extraordinary powers. These elements of 
scientific inquiry fall in with the discipline of the poet. But, 
on the other hand, a mind thus richly endowed in the direction 
of natural history may be almost shorn of endowment as re- 
gards the more strictly called physical and mechanical sciences. 
Goethe was in this condition. He could not formulate distinct 
mechanical conceptions ; he could not see the force of mechan- 
ical reasoning ; and in regions where such reasoning reigns 
supreme he became a mere ignis Jatuus ^ to those who followed 
him. 

I have sometimes permitted myself to compare Aristotle 
with Goethe ; to credit the Stagirite with an almost superhuman 
power of amassing and systematizing facts, but to consider him 
fatally defective on that side of the mind in respect to which 
incompleteness has been justly ascribed to Goethe. Whewell 
refers the errors of Aristotle, not to a neglect of facts, but to 
"a neglect of the idea appropriate to the facts; the idea of 
mechanical cause, which is force, and the substitution of vague 
or inapplicable notions, involving only relations of space or emo- 
tions of wonder." This is doubtless true ; but the word "neg- 
lect" implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aris- 
totle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer 
natural incapacity, which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a 
physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of 
the worst attributes of a modern physical investigator — indis- 
tinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of 
language, which led to the delusive notion that he had really 
mastered his subject, while he as yet had failed to grasp even the 
elements of it. He put words in the place of things, subject in 
the place of object. He preached induction without practicing 
it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing from the general 
to the particular, instead of from the particular to the general. 
1 Delusive influence. — -Editors. 



i 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 283 

He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the center of which 
he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own 
satisfaction and that of the world for nearly two thousand years, 
that no other universe was possible. His notions of motion 
were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, better 
or worse, calm or violent — no real mechanical conception 
regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind. He affirmed that 
a vacuum could not exist, and proved that if it did exist, motion 
in it would be impossible. He determined a priori how many 
species of animals must exist, and showed on general principles 
why animals must have such and such parts. When an emi- 
nent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed from errors 
of this kind, remembers these abuses of the a priori method, 
he will be able to make allowance for the jealousy of physicists 
as to the acceptance of so-called d priori truths. Aristotle's 
errors of detail were grave and numerous. He affirmed that 
only in man we had the beating of the heart, that the left side 
of the body was colder than the right, that men have more 
teeth than women, and that there is an empty space, not at the 
front, but at the back, of every man's head. 

There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which 
was entirely wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers. I 
wish it could be expressed by a word untainted by its associa- 
tions ; it signifies a capability of being placed as a coherent 
picture before the mind. The Germans express the act of pic- 
turing by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a Vor- 
stellung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to 
our requirements than imagination, and, taken with its proper 
limitations, the word answers very well ; but, as just intimated, 
it is tainted by its associations, and therefore objectionable to 
some minds. Compare, with reference to this capacity of mental 
presentation, the case of the Aristotelian who refers the ascent 
of water in a pump to Nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, with 
that of Pascal when he proposed to solve the question of atmos- 
pheric pressure by the ascent of the Puy de Dome. In the one 
case the terms of the explanation refuse to fall into place as a 



284 JOHN TYNDALL 

physical image ; in the other the image is distinct, the fall and 
rise of the barometer being clearly figured as the balancing of 
two varying and opposing pressures. 

During the drought of the Middle Ages in Christendom, the 
Arabian intellect, as forcibly shown by Draper, was active. 
With the intrusion of the Moors into Spain, cleanliness, order, 
learning, and refinement took the place of their opposites. 
When smitten with disease, the Christian peasant resorted to 
a shrine ; the Moorish one to an instructed physician. The 
Arabs encouraged translations from the Greek philosophers, 
but not from the Greek poets. They turned in disgust "from 
the lewdness of our classical mythology, and denounced as an un- 
pardonable blasphemy all connection between the impure Olym- 
pian Jove and the Most High God." Draper traces still further 
than Whewell the Arab elements in our scientific terms, and points 
out that the undergarment of ladies retains to this hour its 
Arab name. He gives examples of what Arabian men of science 
accomplished, dwelling particularly on Alhazen, who was the 
first to correct the Platonic notion that rays of light are emitted 
by the eye. He discovered atmospheric refraction, and points 
out that we see the sun and moon after they have set. He 
explains the enlargement of the sun and moon, and the shorten- 
ing of the vertical diameters of both these bodies when near the 
horizon. He is aware that the atmosphere decreases in density 
with increase of height, and actually fixes its height at fifty- 
eight and one half miles. In the Book of the Bala)ice Wisdom, 
he sets forth the connection between the weight of the atmos- 
phere and its increasing density. He shows that a body will 
Aveigh differently in a rare and a dense atmosphere. He considers 
the force with which plunged bodies rise through heavier media. 
He understands the doctrine of the center of gravity, and applies 
it to the investigation of balances and steelyards. He recog- 
nizes gravity as a force, though he falls into the error of making 
it diminish at a distance, and of making it purely terrestrial. 
He knows the relation between the velocities, spaces, and times 
of falling bodies, and has distinct ideas of capillary attraction. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 285 

He improves the hydrometer. The determination of the den- 
sities of bodies as given by Alhazen approaches very closely to 
our own. " I join," says Draper, " in the pious prayer of Alhazen, 
' that in the day of judgment the All-Merciful will take pity on 
the soul of Abur-Raihan, because he was the first of the race of 
men to construct a table of specific gravities.' " If all this be 
historic truth (and I have entire confidence in Dr. Draper), 
well may he "deplore the systematic manner in which the lit- 
erature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight our scientific 
obligations to the Mohammedans." ^ 

Toward the close of the stationary period, a word- weariness, 
if I may so express it, took more and more possession of men's 
minds. Christendom had become sick of the school philosophy 
and its verbal wastes, which led to no issue, but left the intellect 
in everlasting haze. Here and there was heard the voice of one 
impatiently crying in the wilderness, "Not unto Aristotle, not 
unto subtle hypotheses, not unto Church, Bible, or blind tradi- 
tion, must we turn for a knowledge of the universe, but to the 
direct investigation of nature by observation and experiment." 
In 1543 the epoch-making work of Copernicus on the paths of 
the heavenly bodies appeared. The total crash of Aristotle's 
closed universe with the earth at its center followed as a conse- 
quence; and "the earth moves" became a kind of watchword 
among intellectual freemen. Copernicus was the Canon of the 
Church of Frauenburg, in the diocese of Ermeland. For three 
and thirty years he had withdrawn himself from the world and 
devoted himself to the consolidation of his great scheme of the 
solar system. He made its blocks eternal ; and even to those 
who feared it and desired its overthrow, it was so obviously 
strong that they refrained from meddling with it. In the last 
year of the life of Copernicus his book appeared. It is said that 
the old man received a copy of it a few days before his death, 
and then departed in peace. 

The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was one of the 
earliest converts to the new astronomy. Taking Lucretius 
' Intellectual Development of Europe, p. 359. 



286 JOHN TYNDALL 

as his exemplar, he revived the notion of the infinity of worlds ; 
and, combining with it the doctrine of Copernicus, reached the 
sublime generalization that the fixed stars are suns, scattered 
numberless through space and accompanied by satellites, which 
bear the same relation to them as the earth does to our sun, or 
our moon to our earth. This was an expansion of transcendent 
import ; but Bruno came closer than this to our present line of 
thought. Struck with the problem of the generation and main- 
tenance of organisms, and duly pondering it, he came to the con- 
clusion that nature in her productions does not imitate the 
technic of man. Her process is one of unraveling and unfolding. 
The infinity of forms under which matter appears was not im- 
posed upon it by an external artificer; by its own intrinsic 
force and virtue it brings these forms forth. Matter is not the 
mere naked, empty capacity which philosophers have pictured 
her to be, but the universal mother, who brings forth all things 
as the fruit of her own womb. 

This outspoken, man was originally a Dominican monk. He 
was accused of heresy and had to fly, seeking refuge in Geneva, 
Paris, England, and Germany. In 1592 he fell into the hands of 
the Inquisition at Venice. He was imprisoned for many years, 
tried, degraded, excommunicated, and handed over to the civil 
power, with the request that he should be treated gently and 
"without the shedding of blood." This meant that he was to be 
burned ; and burned accordingly he was, on February 16, 1600. 
To escape a similar fate, Galileo, thirty-three years afterward, 
abjured, upon his knees and with his hand on the Holy Gospels, 
the heliocentric doctrine.^ After Galileo came Kepler, who from 
his German home defied the power beyond the Alps. He traced 
out from preexisting observations the laws of planetary motion. 
The problem was thus prepared for Newton, who bound those 
empirical laws together by the principle of gravitation. 

During the Middle Ages the doctrine of atoms had to all 
appearance vanished from discussion. In all probability it held 
its ground among sober-minded and thoughtful men, though 

1 The theory that the sun is the center of our planetary system. — Editors. 






THE BELFAST ADDRESS 287 

neither the Church nor the world was prepared to hear of it with 
tolerance. Once, in the year 1348, it received distinct expres- 
sion. But retraction by compulsion immediately followed, and 
thus discouraged, it slumbered till the seventeenth century, 
when it was revived by a contemporary of Hobbes and Descartes, 
the Pere Gassendi. 

The analytic and synthetic tendencies of the human mind 
exhibit themselves throughout history, great writers ranging 
themselves sometimes on the one side, sometimes on the other. 
Men of lofty feelings, and minds open to the elevating impres- 
sions produced by nature as a whole, whose satisfaction, there- 
fore, is rather ethical than logical, have leaned to the synthetic 
side ; while the analytic harmonizes best with the more precise 
and more mechanical bias which seeks the satisfaction of the 
understanding. Some form of pantheism was usually adopted 
by the one, while a detached Creator, working more or less after 
the manner of men, was often assumed by the other. ^ Gassendi 
is hardly to be ranked with either. Having formerly acknowl- 
edged God as the first great cause, he immediately drops the 
idea, applies the known laws of mechanics to the atoms, and 
thence deduces all vital phenomena. God, who created earth 
and water, plants and animals, produced in the first place a 
definite number of atoms, which constituted the seed of all things. 
Then began that series of combinations and decompositions 
which goes on at the present day, and which will continue in 
the future. The principle of every change resides in matter. 
In artificial productions the moving principle is different from 
the material worked upon ; but in nature the agent works 
within, being the most active and mobile part of the material 
itself. Thus this bold ecclesiastic, without incurring the cen- 
sure of the Church or the world, contrives to outstrip Mr. Dar- 

1 Boyle's model of the universe was the Strasburg clock with an outside 
artificer. Goethe, on the other hand, sang 

"Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
Natur in sich, sich in Natur zu hegen." 

The same repugnance to the clockmaker conception is manifest in Carlyle, 



288 JOHN TYNDALL 

win. The same cast of mind which caused him to detach the 
Creator from his universe led him also to detach the soul from 
the body, though to the body he ascribes an influence so large 
as to render the soul almost unnecessary. The aberrations of- 
reason were in his view an affair of the material brain. Mental 
disease is brain disease ; but then the immortal reason sits 
apart, and cannot be touched by the disease. The errors of 
madness are errors of the instrument, not of the performer. 

It may be more than a mere result of education, connecting 
itself probably with the deeper mental structure of the two men, 
that the idea of Gassendi, above enunciated, is substantially the 
same as that expressed by Professor Clerk-Maxwell at the close 
of the very noble lecture delivered by him at Bradford last year. 
According to both philosophers, the atoms, if I understand 
aright, are the prepared materials, the "manufactured articles," 
which, formed by the skill of the Highest, produce by their sub- 
sequent interaction all the phenomena of the material world. 
There seems to be this difference, however, between Gassendi 
and Maxwell. The one postulates, the other infers, his first 
cause. In his manufactured articles, Professor Maxwell finds 
the basis of an induction which enables him to scale philosophic 
heights considered inaccessible by Kant, and to take the logical 
step from the atoms to their Maker. 

The atomic doctrine, in whole or in part, was entertained by 
Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Boyle, and their 
successors, until the chemical law of multiple proportions en- 
abled Dalton to confer upon it an entirely new significance. In 
our day there are secessions from the theory, but it still stands 
firm. Only a year or two ago Sir William Thomson, with char- 
acteristic penetration, sought to determine the sizes of the atoms, 
or rather to fix the limits between which their sizes lie; while 
only last year the discourses of Williamson and Maxwell illus- 
trated the present hold of the doctrine upon the foremost scientific 
minds. What these atoms, self-moved and self-posited, can 
and cannot accomplish in relation to life, is at the present mo- 
ment the subject of profound scientific thought. I doubt the 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 289 

legitimacy of Maxwell's logic ; but it is impossible not to feel 
the ethic glow with which his lecture concludes. There is, 
moreover, a Lucretian grandeur in his description of the stead- 
fastness of the atoms: "Natural causes, as we know, are at 
work, which tend to modify, if they do not at length destroy, 
all the arrangements and dimensions of the earth and the whole 
solar system. But though in the course of ages catastrophes 
have occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient 
systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their 
ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built, the 
foundation stones of the material universe, remain unbroken 
and unworn." 

Ninety years subsequent to Gassendi, the doctrine of bodily 
instruments, as it may be called, assumed immense importance 
in the hands of Bishop Butler, who, in his famous Analogy cf 
Religion, developed from his own point of view, and with con- 
summate sagacity, a similar idea. The bishop still influences 
superior minds ; and it will repay us to dwell for a moment on 
his views. He draws the sharpest distinction between our real 
selves and our bodily instruments. He does not, as far as I 
remember, use the word soul, possibly because the term was 
so hackneyed in his day, as it had been for many generations 
previously. But he speaks of "living powers," "perceiving" or 
"percipient powers," "moving agents," "ourselves," in the 
same sense as we should employ the term soul. He dwells upon 
the fact that limbs may be removed and mortal diseases assail 
the body, while the mind, almost up to the moment of death, 
remains clear. He refers to sleep and to swoon, where the 
" living powers " are suspended, but not destroyed. He considers 
it quite as easy to conceive of an existence out of our bodies as 
in them ; that we may animate a succession of bodies, the dis- 
solution of all of them having no more tendency to dissolve our 
real selves, or "deprive us of living faculties — the faculties of 
perception and action — than the dissolution of any foreign 
matter which we are capable of receiving impressions from, or 
making use of, for the common occasions of life." This is the 



500 JOHN TYND-\LL 

key of the bishop's position : "Our organized bodies are no 
more a part of ourselves than any other matter around us." 
In proof of this, he calls attention to the use of glasses, which 
"prepare objects" for the "percipient power" exactly as the 
eye does. The eye itself is no more percipient than the glass, 
and is quite as much the instrument of the true self, and also as 
foreign to the true self, as the glass is. "And if we see with our 
eyes only in the same manner as we do with glasses, the like may 
justly be concluded from analogy of all our senses." 

Lucretius, as you are aware, reached a precisely opposite con- 
clusion ; and it certainly would be interesting, if not profit- 
able, to us all, to hear what he would or could urge in opposition 
to the reasoning of the bishop. As a brief discussion of the point 
will enable us to see the bearings of an important question, I 
will here permit a disciple of Lucretius to try the strength of 
the bishop's position, and then allow the bishop to retaliate, 
with the view of rolling back, if he can, the difficulty upon Lucre- 
tius. Each shall state his case fully and frankly ; and you shall 
be umpire between them. The argument might proceed in this 
fashion : 

"Subjected to the test of mental presentation (Vorstellufig), 
your views, most honored prelate, would present to many minds 
a great, if not an insuperable, difficulty. You speak of 'living 
powers,' 'percipient or perceiving powers,' and 'ourselves;' but 
can you form a mental picture of any one of these apart from the 
organism through which it is supposed to act? Test yourself 
honestly, and see whether you possess any faculty that would 
enable you to form such a conception. The true self has a local 
habitation in each of us ; thus localized, must it not possess a 
form ? If so, what form ? Have you ever for a moment realized 
it ? When a leg is amputated, the body is divided into two parts ; 
is the true self in both of them or in one? Thomas Aquinas 
might say in both ; but not you, for you appeal to the conscious- 
ness associated with one of the two parts to prove that the other 
is foreign matter. Is consciousness, then, a necessary element 
of the true self ? If so, what do you say to the case of the whole 



II 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 591 

body being deprived of consciousness? If not, then on what 
grounds do you deny any portion of the true self to the severed 
Hmb ? It seems very singular that, from the beginning to the 
end of your admirable book (and no one admires its sober 
strength more than I do), you never once mention the brain or 
nervous system. You begin at one end of the body, and show 
that its parts may be removed without prejudice to the perceiv- 
ing power. What if you begin at the other end, and remove, 
instead of the leg, the brain ? The body, as before, is divided 
into two parts ; but both are now in the same predicament, and 
neither can be appealed to to prove that the other is foreign 
matter. Or, instead of going so far as to remove the brain itself, 
let a certain portion of its bony covering be removed, and let 
a rhythmic series of pressure and relaxations of pressure be 
applied to the soft substance. At every pressure 'the facul- 
ties of perception and of action ' vanish ; at every relaxation 
of pressure they are restored. Where, during the intervals of 
pressure, is the perceiving power ? I once had the discharge of 
a Leyden battery passed unexpectedly through me : I felt noth- 
ing, but was simply blotted out of conscious existence for a 
sensible interval. Where was my true self during that interval ? 
Men who have recovered from lightning stroke have been much 
longer in the same state ; and indeed in cases of ordinary con- 
cussion of the brain, days may elapse during which no experience 
is registered in consciousness. Where is the man himself during 
the period of insensibility? You may say that I beg the 
question when I assume the man to have been unconscious, that 
he was really conscious all the time, and has simply forgotten 
what had occurred to him. In reply to this, I can only say that 
no one need shrink from the worst tortures that superstition 
ever invented if only so felt and so remembered. I do not think 
your theory of instruments goes at all to the bottom of the 
matter. A telegraph operator has his instruments, by means of 
which he converses with the world ; our bodies possess a nervous 
system, which plays a similar part between the perceiving powers 
and external things. Cut the wires of the operator, break his 



ig2 JOHN TYNDALL 

battery, demagnetize his needle : by this means you certainly 
sever his connection with the world ; but inasmuch as these are 
real instruments, their destruction does not touch the man who 
uses them. The operator survives, and he knows that he sur- 
vives. What is it, I would ask, in the human system that an- 
swers to this conscious survival of the operator when the bat- 
tery of the brain is so disturbed as to produce insensibility, or 
when it is destroyed altogether? 

" Another consideration, which you may consider slight, presses 
upon me with some force. The brain may change from health 
to disease, and through such a change the most exemplary man 
may be converted into a debauchee or a murderer. My very 
noble and approved good master had, as you know, threatenings 
of lewdness introduced into his brain by his jealous wife's philter ; 
and sooner than permit himself to run even the risk of yielding 
to these base promptings, he slew himself. How could the hand 
of Lucretius have been thus turned against himself if the real 
Lucretius remained as before ? Can the brain or can it not act 
in this distempered way without the intervention of the immor- 
tal reason ? If it can, then it is a prime mover which requires 
only healthy regulation to render it reasonably self-acting, and 
there is no apparent need of your immortal reason at all. If it 
cannot, then the immortal reason, by its mischievous activity 
in operating upon a broken instrument, must have the credit 
of committing every imaginable extravagance and crime. I 
think, if you will allow me to say so, that the gravest conse- 
quences are likely to flow from your estimate of the body. To 
regard the brain as you would a staff or an eyeglass — to shut 
your eyes to all its mystery, to the perfect correlation that reigns 
between its condition and our consciousness, to the fact that a 
slight excess or defect of blood in it produces that very swoon 
to which you refer, and that in relation to it our meat and drink 
and air and exercise have a perfectly transcendental value and 
significance — to forget all this does, I think, open a way to 
innumerable errors in our habits of life, and may possibly in 
some cases initiate and foster that very disease, and consequent 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 293 

mental ruin, which a wiser appreciation of this mysterious or- 
gan would have avoided." 

I can imagine the bishop thoughtful after hearing this argu- 
ment. He was not the man to allow anger to mingle with the 
consideration of a point of this kind. After due consideration, 
and having strengthened himself by that honest contemplation 
of the facts which was habitual with him, and which includes 
the desire to give even adverse facts their due weight, I can sup- 
pose the bishop to proceed thus : " You will remember that in the 
Analogy of Religion, of which you have so kindly spoken, I did 
not profess to prove anything absolutely, and that I over and 
over again acknowledged and insisted on the smallness of our 
knowledge, or rather the depth of our ignorance, as regards the 
whole system of the universe. My object was to show my 
deistical friends who set forth so eloquently the beauty and benef- 
icence of Nature and the Ruler thereof, while they had nothing 
but scorn for the so-called absurdities of the Christian scheme, 
that they were in no better condition than we were, and that for 
every difficulty they found upon our side, quite as great a diffi- 
culty was to be found on theirs. I will now with your per- 
mission adopt a similar line of argument. You are a Lucretian, 
and from the combination and separation of atoms deduce all ter- 
restrial things, including organic forms and their phenomena. 
Let me tell you in the first instance how far I am prepared to 
go with you. I admit that you can build crystalline forms out 
of this play of molecular force ; that the diamond, amethyst, 
and snow star are truly wonderful structures which are thus pro- 
duced. I will go further, and acknowledge that even a tree or 
flower might in this way be organized. Nay, if you can show 
me an animal without sensation, I will concede to you that it also 
might be put together by the suitable play of molecular force. 

"Thus far our way is clear, but now comes my difficulty. 
Your atoms are individually without sensation ; much more are 
they without intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your 
hand upon this problem ? Take your dead hydrogen atoms, 
your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, your dead 



294 JOHN TYND.\LL 

nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all the other 
atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed. 
Imagine them separate and sensationless ; observe them run- 
ning together and forming all imaginable combinations. This, 
as a purely mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But can 
you see, or dream, or in any way imagine, how out of that 
mechanical act, and from these individually dead atoms, sensa- 
tion, thought, and emotion are to arise ? You speak of the diffi- 
culty of mental presentation in my case ; is it less in yours ? I 
am not all bereft of this Vorstellimgs-kraft^ of which you speak. 
I can follow a particle of musk until it reaches the olfactory 
nerve ; I can follow the waves of sound until their tremors 
reach the water of the labyrinth, and set the otoliths and 
Corti's fibers in motion ; I can also visualize the waves of ether 
as they cross the eye and hit the retina. Nay, more, I am able 
to follow up to the central organ the motion thus imparted at 
the periphery, and to see in idea the very molecules of the brain 
thrown into tremors. My insight is not baffled by these physical 
processes. What baffles me, what I find unimaginable, tran- 
scending every faculty I possess — transcending, I humbly sub- 
mit, every faculty you possess — is the notion that out of those 
physical tremors you can extract things so utterly incongruous 
with them as sensation, thought, and emotion. You may say, 
or think, that this issue of consciousness from the clash of 
atoms is not more incongruous than the flash of light from the 
union of oxygen and hydrogen. But I beg to say that it is. 
For such incongruity as the flash possesses is that which I now 
force upon your attention. The flash is an affair of consciousness, 
the objective counterpart of which is a vibration. It is a flash 
only by our interpretation. You are the cause of the apparent 
incongruity ; and you are the thing that puzzles me. I need not 
remind you that the great Leibnitz felt the difficulty which I feel, 
and that to get rid of this monstrous deduction of life from death 
he displaced your atoms by his monads, which were more or 
less perfect mirrors of the universe, and out of the summation 
1 Power of imagining. — Editors. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 295 

and integration of which he supposed all the phenomena of life 
— sentient, intellectual, and emotional — to arise. 

"Your difficulty, then, as I see you are ready to admit, is 
quite as great as mine. You cannot satisfy the human under- 
standing in its demand for logical continuity between molecular 
processes and the phenomena of consciousness. This is a rock 
on which materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends 
to be a complete philosophy of life. What is the moral, my 
Lucretian ? You and I are not likely to indulge in ill temper in 
the disclission of these great topics, where we see so much room 
for honest differences of opinion. But there are people of less wit 
or more bigotry (I say it with humility) on both sides, who are 
ever ready to mingle anger and vituperation with such discus- 
sions. There are, for example, writers of note and influence 
at the present day who are not ashamed to assume the 'deep 
personal sin' of a great logician to be the cause of his unbelief 
in a theologic dogma. And there are others who hold that we, 
who cherish our noble Bible, wrought as it has been into the 
constitution of our forefathers, and by inheritance into us, must 
necessarily be hypocritical and insincere. Let us disavow and 
discountenance such people, cherishing the unswerving faith 
that what is good and true in both our arguments will be pre- 
served for the benefit of humanity, while all that is bad or 
false will disappear." 

It is worth remarking that in one respect the bishop was a 
product of his age. Long previous to his day the nature of the 
soul had been so favorite and general a topic of discussion that 
when the students of the University of Paris wished to know the 
leanings of a new professor, they at once requested him to lecture 
upon the soul. About the time of Bishop Butler the question 
was not only agitated, but extended. It was seen by the clear- 
witted men who entered this arena that many of their best argu- 
ments applied equally to brutes and men. The bishop's argu- 
ments were of this character. He saw it, admitted it, accepted 
the consequences, and boldly embraced the whole animal world 
in his scheme of immortality. 



296 JOHN TYNDALL 

Bishop Butler accepted with unwavering trust the chronology 
of the Old Testament, describing it as "confirmed by the natural 
and civil history of the world, collected from common historians, 
from the state of the earth, and from the late inventions of arts 
and sciences." These words mark progress ; they must seem 
somewhat hoary to the bishop's successors of to-day.^ It is 
hardly necessary to inform you that since his time the domain 
of the naturalist has been immensely extended — the whole sci- 
ence of geology, with its astounding revelations regarding the 
life of the ancient earth, having been created. The rigidity of 
old conceptions has been relaxed, the public mind being rendered 
gradually tolerant of the idea that not for six thousand, nor for 
sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons em- 
bracing untold millions of years, this earth has been the theater 
of life and death. The riddle of the rocks has been read by the 
geologist and paleontologist, from sub-Cambrian depths to the 
deposits thickening over the sea bottoms of to-day. And upon 
the leaves of that stone book are, as you know, stamped the char- 
acters, plainer and surer than those formed by the ink of history, 
which carry the mind back into abysses of past time compared 
with which the periods which satisfied Bishop Butler cease to 
have a visual angle. Everybody now knows this ; all men admit 
it ; still, when they were first broached, these verities of science 
found loud-tongued denunciators, who proclaimed not only their 
baselessness considered scientifically, but their immorality con- 
sidered as questions of ethics and religion : the Book of Genesis 
had stated the question in a different fashion ; and science must 
necessarily go to pieces when it clashed with this authority. 
And as the seed of the thistle produces a thistle, and nothing else, 
so these objectors scatter their germs abroad, and reproduce their 
kind, ready to play again the part of their intellectual progeni- 
tors, to show the same virulence, the same ignorance, to achieve 
for a time the same success, and finally to suffer the same inexor- 

^ Only to some ; for there are dignitaries who even now speak of the 
earth's rocky crust as so much building material prepared for man at the 
Creation. Surely it is time that this loose language should cease. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 297 

able defeat. Sure the time must come at last when human na- 
ture in its entirety, whose legitimate demands it is admitted 
science alone cannot satisfy, will find interpreters and expositors 
of a different stamp from those rash and ill-informed persons who 
have been hitherto so ready to hurl themselves against every new 
scientific revelation, lest it should endanger what they are pleased 
to consider theirs. 

The lode of discovery once struck, those petrified forms in 
which Ufe was at one time active increased to multitudes and de- 
manded classification. The general fact soon became evident 
that none but the simplest forms of life He lowest down, that as 
we cHmb higher and higher among the superimposed strata more 
perfect forms appear. The change, however, from form to form 
was not continuous, but by steps, some small, some great. "A 
section," says Mr. Huxley, "a hundred feet thick will exhibit at 
different heights a dozen species of ammonite, none of which 
passes beyond its particular zone of limestone, or clay, into the 
zone below it, or into that above it." In the presence of such 
facts it was not possible to avoid the question. Have these 
forms, showing, though in broken stages and with many irregu- 
larities, this unmistakable general advance, been subjected to 
no continuous law of growth or variation ? Had our education 
been purely scientific, or had it been sufficiently detached from 
influences which, however ennobling in another domain, have 
always proved hindrances and delusions when introduced as 
factors into the domain of physics, the scientific mind never 
could have swerved from the search for a law of growth, or al- 
lowed itself to accept the anthropomorphism which regarded each 
successive stratum as a kind of mechanic's bench for the manu- 
facture of new species out of all relation to the old. 

Biased, however, by their previous education, the great major- 
ity of naturalists invoked a special creative act to account for 
the appearance of each new group of organisms. Doubtless 
there were numbers who were clear-headed enough to see that 
this was no explanation at all ; that in point of fact it was an 
attempt, by the introduction of a greater difficulty, to account 



298 JOHN TYNDALL 

for a less. But having nothing to offer in the way of explana- 
tion, they for the most part held their peace. Still the thoughts 
of reflecting men naturally and necessarily simmered round the 
question. De Maillet, a contemporary of Newton, has been 
brought into notice by Professor Huxley as one who "had a no- 
tion of the modifiability of living forms." In my frequent 
conversations with him, the late Sir Benjamin Brodie, a man of 
highly philosophic mind, often drew my attention to the fact 
that, as early as 1794, Charles Darwin's grandfather was the 
pioneer of Charles Darwin. In 1801, and in subsequent years, 
the celebrated Lamarck, who produced so profound an impres- 
sion on the public mind through the vigorous exposition of his 
views by the author of Vestiges of Creation, endeavored to 
show the development of species out of changes of habit and ex- 
ternal condition. In 1813 Dr. Wells, the founder of our present 
theory of dew, read before the Royal Society a paper in which, 
to use the words of Mr. Darwin, "he distinctly recognizes the 
principle of natural selection; and this is the first recognition 
that has been indicated." The thoroughness and skill with 
which Wells pursued his work, and the obvious independence 
of his character, rendered him long ago a favorite with me ; and 
it gave me the liveliest pleasure to alight upon this additional 
testimony to his penetration. Professor Grant, Mr. Patrick 
Matthew, von Buch, the author of the Vestiges, D'Halloy, 
and others,^ by the enunciation of views more or less clear and 
correct, showed that the question had been fermenting long 
prior to the year 1858, when Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace simul- 
taneously, but independently, placed their closely concurrent 
views upon the subject before the Linnaean Society. 

These papers were followed in 1859 by the publication of the 
first edition of The Origin of Species. All great things come 
slowly to the birth. Copernicus, as I informed you, pondered 

' In 1855 Mr. Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 2d ed., vol. i, 
p. 465) expressed " the belief that life under all its forms has arisen by an un- 
broken ev^olution, and through the instrumentality of what are called nat- 
iiral causes." 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 299 

his great work for thirty-three years. Newton for nearly twenty 
years kept the idea of gravitation before his mind ; for twenty 
years also he dwelt upon his discovery of fluxions, and doubtless 
would have continued to make it the object of his private thought 
had he not found that Leibnitz was upon his track. Darwin for 
two and twenty years pondered the problem of the origin of 
species, and doubtless he would have continued to do so had he 
not found Wallace upon his track. ^ A concentrated but full and 
powerful epitome of his labors was the consequence. The book 
was by no means an easy one ; and probably not one in every 
score of those who then attacked it had read its pages through, or 
was competent to grasp their significance if he had. I do not 
say this merely to discredit them ; for there were in those days 
some really eminent scientific men, entirely raised above the heat 
of popular prejudice, willing to accept any conclusion that science 
had to offer, provided it was duly backed by fact and argument, 
and who entirely mistook Mr. Darwin's views. In fact, the work 
needed an expounder ; and it found one in Mr. Huxley. I know 
nothing more admirable in the way of scientific exposition than 
those early articles of his on the origin of species. He swept the 
curve of discussion through the really significant points of the 
subject, enriched his exposition with profound original remarks 
and reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an 
argument which a less compact mind would have spread over 
pages. But there is one impression made by the book itself 
which no exposition of it, however luminous, can convey; and 
that is the impression of the vast amount of labor, both of ob- 
servation and of thought, implied in its production. Let us 
glance at its principles. 

It is conceded on all hands that what are called varieties are 
continually produced. The rule is probably without exception. 
No chick and no child is in all respects and particulars the coun- 
terpart of its brother or sister ; and in such differences we have 
"variety" incipient. No naturalist could tell how far this varia- 

1 The behavior of Mr. Wallace in relation to this subject has been dignified 
in the highest degree. 



300 JOHN TYNDALL 

tion could be carried ; but the great mass of them held that never 
by any amount of internal or external change, nor by the mixture 
of both, could the offspring of the same progenitor so far deviate 
from each other as to constitute different species. The function 
of the experimental philosopher is to combine the conditions of 
nature and to produce her results ; and this was the method of 
Darwin.^ He made himself acquainted with what could, without 
any manner of doubt, be done in the way of producing variation. 
He associated himself with pigeon fanciers — bought, begged, 
kept, and observed every breed that he could obtain. Though 
derived from a common stock, the diversities of these pigeons 
were such that "a score of them might be chosen which, if shown 
to an ornithologist, and. he were told that they were wild birds, 
would certainly be ranked by him as well-defined species." The 
simple principle which guides the pigeon fancier, as it does the 
cattle breeder, is the selection of some variety that strikes his 
fancy, and the propagation of this variety by inheritance. With 
his eye still upon the particular appearance which he wishes to 
exaggerate, he selects it as it reappears in successive broods, and 
thus adds increment to increment until an astonishing amount 
of divergence from the parent type is effected. Man in this case 
does not produce the elements of the variation. He simply ob- 
serves them, and by selection adds them together until the re- 
quired result has been obtained. "No man," says Mr. Darwin, 
" would ever try to make a fantail till he saw a pigeon with a tail 
developed in some slight degree in an unusual manner, or a 
pouter until he saw a pigeon with a crop of unusual size." Thus 
nature gives the hint, man acts upon it, and by the law of inherit- 
ance exaggerates the deviation. 

Having thus satisfied himself by indubitable facts that the or- 
ganization of an animal or of a plant (for precisely the same 
treatment applies to plants) is to some extent plastic, he passes 
from variation under domestication to variation under nature. 

1 The first step only toward experimental demonstration has been taken. 
Experiments now begun might, a couple of centuries hence, furnish data of 
incalculable value, which ought to be supplied to the science of the future. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 301 

Hitherto we have dealt with the adding together of small changes 
by the conscious selection of man. Can nature thus select? 
Mr. Darwin's answer is, "Assuredly she can." The number of 
living things produced is far in excess of the number that can be 
supported; hence at some period or other of their lives there 
must be a struggle for existence ; and what is the infallible result ? 
If one organism were a perfect copy of the other in regard to 
strength, skill, and agility, external conditions would decide. 
But this is not the case. Here we have the fact of variety offer- 
ing itself to nature, as in the former instance it offered itself to 
man ; and those varieties which are least competent to cope with 
surrounding conditions will infallibly give way to those that are 
competent. To use a familiar proverb, the weakest comes to 
the wall. But the triumphant fraction again breeds to over- 
production, transmitting the qualities which secured its mainte- 
nance, but transmitting them in different degrees. The struggle 
for food again supervenes, and those to whom the favorable 
quality has been transmitted in excess will assuredly triumph. 
It is easy to see that we have here the addition of increments 
favorable to the individual still more rigorously carried out than 
in the case of domestication ; for not only are unfavorable speci- 
mens not selected by nature, but they are destroyed. This is 
what Mr. Darwin calls "natural selection," which "acts by the 
preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, 
each profitable to the preserved being." With this idea he in- 
terpenetrates and leavens the vast store of facts that he and 
others have collected. We cannot, without shutting our eyes 
through fear or prejudice, fail to see that Darwin is here dealing, 
not with imaginary, but with true, causes; nor can we fail to 
discern what vast modifications may be produced by natural 
selection in periods sufficiently long. Each individual increment 
may resemble what mathematicians call a "differential" (a 
quantity indefinitely small) ; but definite and great changes may 
obviously be produced by the integration of these infinitesimal 
quantities through practically infinite time. 
If Darwin, like Bruno, rejects the notion of creative power 



302 JOHN TYNDALL 

acting after human fashion, it certainly is not because he is un- 
acquainted with the numberless exquisite adaptations on which 
this notion of a supernatural artificer has been founded. His 
book is a repository of the most startling facts of this description. 
Take the marvelous observation which he cites from Dr. Cruger, 
where a bucket with an aperture, serving as a spout, is formed in 
an orchid. Bees visit the flower : in eager search of material for 
their combs they push each other into the bucket, the drenched 
ones escaping from their involuntary bath by the spout. Here 
they rub their backs against the viscid stigma of the flower and 
obtain glue ; then against the pollen masses, which are thus 
stuck to the back of the bee and carried away. "When the bee, 
thus provided, flies to another flower, or to the same flower a 
second time, and is pushed by its comrades into the bucket, and 
then crawls out by the passage, the pollen mass upon its back 
necessarily comes first into contact with the viscid stigma," 
which takes up the pollen ; and this is how that orchid is ferti- 
lized. Or take this other case of the Catasetum. "Bees visit 
these flowers in order to gnaw the labellum ; on doing this they 
inevitably touch a long, tapering, sensitive projection. This, 
when touched, transmits a sensation or vibration to a certain 
membrane, which is instantly ruptured, setting free a spring, by 
which the pollen mass is shot forth like an arrow in the right 
direction, and adheres by its viscid extremity to the back of the 
bee." In this way the fertilizing pollen is spread abroad. 

It is the mind thus stored with the choicest materials of the 
teleologist that rejects teleology,^ seeking to refer these wonders 
to natural causes. They illustrate, according to him, the method 
of nature, not the " technic " of a manlike artificer. The beauty 
of flowers is due to natural selection. Those that distinguish 
themselves by vividly contrasting colors from the surrounding 
green leaves are most readily seen, most frequently \dsited by 
insects, most often fertilized, and hence most favored by natural 
selection. Colored berries also readily attract the attention of 
birds and beasts, which feed upon them, and spread their manured 
^ The belief that all things exist for a definite purpose. — -Editors. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 303 

seeds abroad, thus giving trees and shrubs possessing such berries 
a greater chance in the struggle for existence. 

With profound analytic and synthetic skill, Mr. Darwin in- 
vestigates the cell-making instinct of the hive bee. His method 
of dealing with it is representative. He falls back from the more 
perfectly to the less perfectly developed instinct — from the 
hive bee to the bumblebee, which uses its own cocoon as a comb, 
and to classes of bees of intermediate skill, endeavoring to show 
how the passage might be gradually made from the lowest to the 
highest. The saving of wax is the most important point in the 
economy of bees. Twelve to fifteen pounds of dry sugar are said 
to be needed for the secretion of a single pound of wax. The 
quantities of nectar necessary for the wax must therefore be vast ; 
and every improvement of constructive instinct which results in 
the saving of wax is a direct profit to the insect's life. The time 
that would otherwise be devoted to the making of wax is now 
devoted to the gathering and storing of honey for winter food. 
He passes from the bumblebee with its rude cells, through the 
Melipona with its more artistic cells, to the hive bee with its 
astonishing architecture. The bees place themselves at equal 
distances apart upon the wax, sweep and excavate equal spheres 
round the selected points. The spheres intersect, and the planes 
of intersection are built up with thin laminae. Hexagonal cells 
are thus formed. This mode of treating such questions is, as I 
have said, representative. He habitually retires from the more 
perfect and complex to the less perfect and simple, carries 
you with him through stages of perfecting, adds increment to 
increment of infinitesimal change, and in this way gradually 
breaks down your reluctance to admit that the exquisite climax 
of the whole could be a result of natural selection. 

Mr. Darwin shirks no difficulty ; and, saturated as the subject 
was with his own thought, he must have known, better than his 
critics, the weakness as well as the strength of his theory. This 
of course would be of little avail were his object a temporary 
dialectic victory instead of the establishment of a truth which he 
means to be everlasting. But he takes no pains to disguise the 



304 JOHN TYNDALL 

weakness he has discerned ; nay, he takes every pains to bring 
it into the strongest Hght. His vast resources enable him to cope 
with objections started by himself and others, so as to leave the 
final impression upon the reader's mind that, if they be not com- 
pletely answered, they certainly are not fatal. Their negative 
force being thus destroyed, you are free to be influenced by the 
vast positive mass of evidence he is able to bring before you. 
This largeness of knowledge and readiness of resource render Mr. 
Darwin the most terrible of antagonists. Accomplished natural- 
ists have leveled heavy and sustained criticisms against him — 
not always with the view of fairly weighing his theory, but with 
the express intention of exposing its weak points only. This 
does not irritate him. He treats every objection with a soberness 
and thoroughness which even Bishop Butler might be proud to 
imitate, surrounding each fact with its appropriate detail, plac- 
ing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a significance 
which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. This 
is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over the sub- 
ject with the passionless strength of a glacier ; and the grinding 
of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the logical 
pulverization of the objector. But though in handling this 
mighty theme all passion has been stilled, there is an emotion of 
the intellect incident to the discernment of new truth which 
often colors and warms the pages of Mr. Darwin. His success 
has been great ; and this implies not only the soHdity of his work, 
but the preparedness of the public mind for such a revelation. 
On this head a remark of Agassiz impressed me more than any- 
thing else. Sprung from a race of theologians, this celebrated 
man combated to the last the theory of natural selection. One 
of the many times I had the pleasure of meeting him in the 
United States was at Mr. Winthrop's beautiful residence at 
Brookline, near Boston. Rising from luncheon, we all halted 
as if by a common impulse in front of a window, and continued 
there a discussion which had been started at table. The maple 
was in its autumn glory ; and the exquisite beauty of the scene 
outside seemed, in my case, to interpenetrate without disturb- 






THE BELFAST ADDRESS 305 

ance the intellectual action. Earnestly, almost sadly, Agassiz 
turned and said to the gentlemen standing round : " I confess that 
I was not prepared to see this theory received as it has been by 
the best intellects of our time. Its success is greater than I 
could have thought possible." 

In our day great generalizations have been reached. The 
theory of the origin of species is but one of them. Another, of 
still wider grasp and more radical significance, is the doctrine 
of the Conservation of Energy, the ultimate philosophical issues 
of which are as yet but dimly seen — that doctrine which "binds 
nature fast in fate" to an extent not hitherto recognized, exact- 
ing from every antecedent its equivalent consequent, from every 
consequent its equivalent antecedent, and bringing vital as well 
as physical phenomena under the dominion of that law of causal 
connection which, as far as the human understanding has yet 
pierced, asserts itself everywhere in nature. Long in advance 
of all definite experiment upon the subject, the constancy and 
indestructability of matter had been affirmed ; and all subse- 
quent experience justified the affirmation. Later researches ex- 
tended the attribute of indestructibility to force. This idea, 
applied in the first instance to inorganic, rapidly embraced or- 
ganic, nature. The vegetable world, though drawing almost all 
its nutriment from invisible sources, was proved incompetent to 
generate anew either matter or force. Its matter is for the most 
part transmuted air; its force transformed solar force. The 
animal world was proved to be equally uncreative, all its motive 
energies being referred to the combustion of its food. The ac- 
tivity of each animal as a whole was proved to be the transferred 
activities of its molecules. The muscles were shown to be stores 
of mechanical force, potential until unlocked by the nerves, and 
then resulting in muscular contractions. The speed at which 
messages fly to and fro along the nerves was determined, and 
found to be, not, as had been previously supposed, equal to that 
of light or electricity, but less than the speed of a flying eagle. 

This was the work of the physicist ; then came the conquests 
of the comparative anatomist and physiologist, revealing the 



3o6 JOHN TYNDALL 

structure of every animal, and the function of every organ in the 
whole biological series, from the lowest zoophyte up to man. 
The nervous system had been made the object of profound and 
continued study, the wonderful, and at bottom entirely mysteri- 
ous, controlling power which it exercises over the whole organism, 
physical and mental, being recognized more and more. Thought 
could not be kept back from a subject so profoundly suggestive. 
Besides the physical life dealt with by Mr. Darwin, there is a 
psychical life presenting similar gradations, and asking equally 
for a solution. How are the different grades and orders of mind 
to be accounted for ? What is the principle of growth of that 
mysterious power which on our planet culminates in Reason? 
These are questions which, though not thrusting themselves so 
forcibly upon the attention of the general public, had not only 
occupied many reflecting minds, but had been formally broached 
by one of them before the Origin of Species appeared. 

With the mass of materials furnished by the physicist and 
physiologist in his hands, Mr. Herbert Spencer, twenty years 
ago, sought to graft upon this basis a system of psychology ; and 
two years ago a second and greatly amplified edition of his work 
appeared. Those who have occupied themselves with the beau- 
tiful experiments of Plateau will remember that when two spher- 
ules of olive oil, suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water of 
the same density as the oil, are brought together, they do not im- 
mediately unite. Something like a pellicle appears to be formed 
around the drops, the rupture of which is immediately followed 
by the coalescence of the globules into one. There are organisms 
whose vital actions are almost as purely physical as that of these 
drops of oil. They come into contact and fuse themselves thus 
together. From such organisms to others a shade higher, and 
from these to others a shade higher still, and on through an ever 
ascending series, Mr. Spencer conducts his argument. There 
are two obvious factors to be here taken into account — the 
creature and the medium in which it lives, or, as it is often ex- 
pressed, the organism and its environment. Mr. Spencer's fun- 
damental principle is, that between these two factors there is 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 307 

incessant interaction. The organism is played upon by the en- 
vironment, and is modified to meet the requirements of the en- 
vironment. Life he defines to be "a continuous adjustment of 
internal relations to external relations." 

In the lowest organisms we have a kind of tactual sense dif- 
fused over the entire body ; then, through impressions from with- 
out and their corresponding adjustments, special portions of the 
surface become more responsive to stimuli than others. The 
senses are nascent, the basis of all of them being that simple tac- 
tual sense which the sage Democritus recognized 2300 years ago 
as their common progenitor. The action of light, in the first 
instance, appears to be a mere disturbance of the chemical pro- 
cesses in the animal organism, similar to that which occurs in 
the leaves of plants. By degrees the action becomes localized in 
a few pigment cells, more sensitive to light than the surround- 
ing tissue. The eye is here incipient. At first it is merely 
capable of revealing differences of light and shade produced by 
bodies close at hand. Followed, as the interception of the light 
is in almost all cases, by the contact of the closely adjacent 
opaque body, sight in this condition becomes a kind of "an- 
ticipatory touch." The adjustment continues ; a slight bulging 
out of the epidermis over the pigment granules supervenes. A 
lens is incipient, and, through the operation of infinite adjust- 
ments, at length reaches the perfection that it displays in the 
hawk and the eagle. So of the other senses ; they are special 
differentiations of a tissue which was originally vaguely sensitive 
all over. 

With the development of the senses the adjustments between 
the organism and its environment gradually extend in space, a 
multiplication of experiences and a corresponding modification of 
conduct being the result. The adjustments also extend in time, 
covering continually greater intervals. Along with this exten- 
sion in space and time, the adjustments also increase in specialty 
and complexity, passing through the various grades of brute life 
and prolonging themselves into the domain of reason. Very 
striking are Mr. Spencer's remarks regarding the influence of 



3o8 JOHN TYNDALL 

the sense of touch upon the development of inteUigence. This is, 
so to say, the mother tongue of all the senses, into which they 
must be translated to be of service to the organism. Hence its 
importance. The parrot is the most intelligent of birds, and its 
tactual power is also greatest. From this sense it gets knowl- 
edge unattainable by birds which cannot employ their feet as 
hands. The elephant is the most sagacious of quadrupeds — its 
tactual range and skill, and the consequent multiplication of 
experiences which it owes to its wonderfully adaptable trunk 
being the basis of its sagacity. Feline animals, for a similar 
cause, are more sagacious than hoofed animals — atonement 
being to some extent made in the case of the horse by the posses- 
sion of sensitive prehensile lips. In the Primates the evolution 
of intellect and the evolution of tactual appendages go hand in 
hand. In the most intelligent anthropoid apes we find the tac- 
tual range and delicacy greatly augmented, new avenues of 
knowledge being thus opened to the animal. Man crowns the 
edifice here, not only in virtue of his own manipulatory power, 
but through the enormous extension of his range of experience, 
by the invention of instruments of precision, which serve as sup- 
plemental senses and supplemental limbs. The reciprocal action 
of these is finely described and illustrated. That chastened in- 
tellectual emotion to which I have referred in connection with 
Mr. Darwin is, I should say, not absent in Mr. Spencer. His 
illustrations possess at times exceeding vividness and force, and 
from his style on such occasions it is to be inferred that the gan- 
glia of this apostle of the understanding are sometimes the seat 
of a nascent poetic thrill. 

It is a fact of supreme importance that actions the perform- 
ance of which at first requires even painful effort and delibera- 
tion may by habit be rendered automatic. Witness the slow 
learning of its letters by a child, and the subsequent facility of 
reading in a man, when each group of letters which forms a 
word is instantly and without effort fused to a single perception. 
Instance the billiard player, whose muscles of hand and eye, 
when he reaches the perfection of his art, are unconsciously co- 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 309 

ordinated. Instance the musician, who by practice is enabled 
to fuse a multitude of arrangements — auditory, tactual, and 
muscular — into a process of automatic manipulation. Com- 
bining such facts with the doctrine of hereditary transmission, 
we reach a theory of instinct. A chick, after coming out of the 
egg, balances itself correctly, runs about, picks up food, thus 
showing that it possesses a power of directing its movements to 
definite ends. How did the chick learn this very complex co- 
ordination of eye, muscles, and beak? It has not been indi- 
vidually taught; its personal experience is nil; but it has the 
benefit of ancestral experience. In its inherited organization 
are registered all the powers which it displays at birth. So also 
as regards the instinct of the hive bee, already referred to. The 
distance at which the insects stand apart when they sweep their 
hemispheres and build their cells is "organically remembered." 
Man also carries with him the physical texture of his ancestry, 
as well as the inherited intellect bound up with it. The defects 
of intelligence during infancy and youth are probably less due 
to a lack of individual experience than to the fact that in early 
life the cerebral organization is still incomplete. The period 
necessary for completion varies with the race and with the in- 
dividual. As a round shot outstrips a rifled one on quitting the 
muzzle of the gun, so the lower race in childhood may outstrip 
the higher. But the higher eventually overtakes the lower, and 
surpasses it in range. As regards individuals, we do not always 
find the precocity of youth prolonged to mental power in ma- 
turity ; while the dullness of boyhood is sometimes strikingly 
contrasted with the intellectual energy of after years. Newton, 
when a boy, was weakly, and he showed no particular aptitude 
at school ; but in his eighteenth year he went to Cambridge, and 
soon afterward astonished his teachers by his power of dealing 
with geometrical problems. During his quiet youth his brain 
was slowly preparing itself to be the organ of those energies 
which he subsequently displayed. 

By myriad blows (to use a Lucretian phrase) the image and 
superscription of the external world are stamped as states of 



3IO JOHN TYNDALL 

consciousness upon the organism, the depth of the impression 
depending upon the number of the blows. When two or more 
phenomena occur in the environment invariably together, they 
are stamped to the same depth or to the same relief, and are 
indissolubly connected. And here we come to the threshold of 
a great question. Seeing that he could in no way rid himself 
of the consciousness of space and time, Kant assumed them to 
be necessary "forms of thought," the molds and shapes into 
which our intuitions are thrown, belonging to ourselves solely 
and without objective existence. With unexpected power and 
success Mr. Spencer brings the hereditary experience theory, as 
he holds it, to bear upon this question. "If there exist certain 
external relations which are experienced by all organisms at all 
instants of their waking lives — relations which are absolutely 
constant and universal — there will be established answering in- 
ternal relations that are absolutely constant and universal. 
Such relations we have in those of space and time. As the sub- 
stratum of all other relations of the Non-Ego, they must be 
responded to by conceptions that are the substrata of all other 
relations in the Ego. Being the constant and infinitely repeated 
elements of thought, they must become the automatic elements 
of thought — the elements of thought which it is impossible to 
get rid of — the 'forms of intuition.'" 

Throughout this application and extension of the "law of in- 
separable association," Mr. Spencer stands on totally different 
ground from Mr. John Stuart Mill, invoking the registered ex- 
periences of the race instead of the experiences of the individual. 
His overthrow of Mr. Mill's restriction of experience is, I think, 
complete. That restriction ignores the power of organizing ex- 
perience furnished at the outset to each individual ; it ignores 
the different degrees of this power possessed by different races 
and by different individuals of the same race. Were there not 
in the human brain a potency antecedent to all experience, a 
dog or cat ought to be as capable of education as a man. These 
predetermined internal relations are independent of the experi- 
ences of the individual. The human brain is the "organized 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 311 

register of infinitely numerous experiences received during the 
evolution of life, or rather during the evolution of that series of 
organisms through which the human organism has been reached. 
The effects of the most uniform and frequent of these experiences 
have been successfully bequeathed, principal and interest, and 
have slowly mounted to that high intelligence which lies latent 
in the brain of the infant. Thus it happens that the European 
inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more of brain than 
the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which 
scarcely exist in some inferior races, become congenital in su- 
perior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to 
count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language 
containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length our Newtons 
and Shakespeares." 

At the outset of this address it was stated that physical theories 
which lie beyond experience are derived by a process of abstrac- 
tion from experience. It is instructive to note from this point 
of view the successive introduction of new conceptions. The 
idea of the attraction of gravitation was preceded by the obser- 
vation of the attraction of iron by a magnet, and of light bodies 
by rubbed amber. The polarity of magnetism and electricity 
appealed to the senses ; and thus became the substratum of the 
conception that atoms and molecules are endowed with definite, 
attractive, and repellent poles, by the play of which definite 
forms of crystalline architecture are produced. This molecular 
force becomes structural. It required no great boldness of 
thought to extend its play into organic nature, and to recognize 
in molecular force the agency by which both plants and animals 
are built up. In this way, out of experience arise conceptions 
which are wholly ultra-experiential. 

The origination of life is a point lightly touched upon, if at 
all, by Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spencer. Diminishing gradually 
the number of progenitors, Mr. Darwin comes at length to one 
"primordial form ;" but he does not say, as far as I remember, 
how he supposes this form to have been introduced. He quotes 
with satisfaction the words of a celebrated author and divine 



312 JOHN TYNDALL 

who had "gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a con- 
ception of the Deity to believe He created a few original forms, 
capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to 
believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the 
voids caused by the action of his laws." What Mr. Darwin 
thinks of this view of the introduction of life I do not know. 
Whether he does or does not introduce his "primordial form" 
by a creative act, I do not know. But the question will inevi- 
tably be asked, "How came the form there?" With regard 
to the diminution of the number of created forms, one does not 
see that much advantage is gained by it. The anthropomor- 
phism, which it seemed the object of Mr. Darwin to set aside, 
is as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with 
the creation of a multitude. We need clearness and thorough- 
ness here. Two courses, and two only, are possible. Either let 
us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts, or, 
abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter. 
If we look at matter as pictured by Democritus, and as defined 
for generations in our scientific textbooks, the absolute impos- 
sibility of any form of life coming out of it would be sufficient 
to render any other hypothesis preferable ; but the definitions 
of matter given in our textbooks were intended to cover its 
purely physical and mechanical properties. And taught as we 
have been to regard these definitions as complete, we naturally 
and rightly reject the monstrous notion that out of such matter 
any form of life could possibly arise. But are the definitions 
complete ? Everything depends on the answer to be given to this 
question. Trace the line of life backward, and see it approach- 
ing more and more to what we call the purely physical condi- 
tion. We reach at length those organisms which I have com- 
pared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. 
We reach the proto genes of Haeckel, in which we have "a type 
distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely 
granular character." Can we pause here? We break a mag- 
net and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue 
the process of breaking, but however small the parts, each 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 313 

carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. 
And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual 
vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something 
similar in the case of life? Is there not a temptation to close 
to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that "Nature is 
seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the med- 
dling of the gods ?" or with Bruno, when he declares that mat- 
ter is not "that mere empty capacity which philosophers have 
pictured her to be, but the universal mother who brings forth 
all things as the fruit of her own womb ?" The questions here 
raised are inevitable. They are approaching us with accelerated 
speed, and it is not a matter of indifference whether they are 
introduced with reverence or irreverence. Abandoning all dis- 
guise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is 
that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the 
experimental evidence, and discern in that matter, which we 
in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence 
for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the 
promise and potency of every form and quality of life. 

The "materialism" here enunciated may be different from 
what you suppose, and I therefore crave your gracious patience 
to the end. "The question of an external world," says Mr. 
J. S. Mill, "is the great battle ground of metaphysics."^ 
Mr. Mill himself reduces external phenomena to "possibilities 
of sensation." Kant,, as we have seen, made time and space 
"forms" of our own intuitions. Fichte, having first by the in- 
exorable logic of his understanding proved himself to be a mere 
link in that chain of external causation which holds so rigidly 
in nature, violently broke the chain by making nature, and all 
that it inherits, an apparition of his own mind.^ And it is by 
no means easy to combat such notions. For when I say I see 
you, and that I have not the least doubt about it, the reply is, 
that what I am really conscious of is an affection of my own 
retina. And if I urge that I can check my sight of you by 
touching you, the retort would be that I am equally transgress- 

1 Examination of Hamilton, p. 154. ^ Bestimmimg des Menschen. 



314 JOHN TYNDALL 

ing the limits of fact ; for what I am really conscious of is, not 
that you are there, but that the nerves of my hand have under- 
gone a change. All we hear, and see, and touch, and taste, and 
smell, are, it would be urged, mere variations of our own con- 
dition, beyond which, even to the extent of a hair's breadth, we 
cannot go. That anything answering to our impressions exists 
outside of ourselves is not a fact, but an inference, to which all 
validity would be denied by an idealist like Berkeley, or by a 
skeptic like Hume. Mr. Spencer takes another line. With him, 
as with the uneducated man, there is no doubt or question as 
to the existence of an external world. But he differs from the 
uneducated, who think that the world really is what conscious- 
ness represents it to be. Our states of consciousness are mere 
symbols of an outside entity which produces them and deter- 
mines the order of their succession, but the real nature of which 
we can never know.^ In fact, the whole process of evolution is 
the manifestation of a Power absolutely inscrutable to the in- 
tellect of man. As little in our day as in the days of Job can 
man, by searching, find this Power out. Considered funda- 
mentally, it is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life 
is evolved, species differentiated, and mind unfolded from their 
prepotent elements in the immeasurable past. There is, you 
will observe, no very rank materialism here. 

* In a paper, at once popular and profound, entitled "Recent Progress in 
the Theory of Vision," contained in the volume of lectures by Helmholtz 
published by Longmans {Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects], this sym- 
bolism of our states of consciousness is also dwelt upon. The impressions of 
sense are the mere signs of external things. In this paper Helmholtz con- 
tends strongly against the view that the consciousness of space is inborn; 
and he evidently doubts the power of the chick to pick up grains of corn 
without some preliminary lessons. On this point, he says, further experi- 
ments are needed. Such experiments have been since made by Mr. Spald- 
ing, aided, I beUeve, in some of his observations by the accomplished and 
deeply lamented Lady Amberley ; and they seem to prove conclusively that 
the chick does not need a single moment's tuition to teach it to stand, run, 
govern the muscles of its eyes, and peck. Helmholtz, however, is contend- 
ing against the notion of preestablished harmony ; and I am not aware of 
his views as to the organization of experiences of race or breed. 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS ' 315 

The strength of the doctrine of evolution consists, not in an 
experimental demonstration (for the subject is hardly accessible 
to this mode of proof), but in its general harmony with the 
method of nature as hitherto known. From contrast, moreover, 
it derives enormous relative strength. On the one side we have 
a theory (if it could with any propriety be so called) derived, as 
were the theories referred to at the beginning of this address, not 
from the study of nature, but from the observation of men — 
a theory which converts the Power whose garment is seen in 
the visible universe into an. artificer, fashioned after the human 
model, and acting by broken efforts as man is seen to act. On 
the other side we have the conception that all we see around us, 
and all we feel within us — the phenomena of physical nature 
as well as those of the human mind — have their unsearchable 
roots in a cosmical life, if I dare apply the term, an infinitesimal 
span of which only is offered to the investigation of man. And 
even this span is only knowable in part. We can trace the de- 
velopment of a nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel 
phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubting 
certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in 
a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connection 
between them. An Archimedean fulcrum is here required 
which the human mind cannot command; and the effort to 
solve the problem, to borrow an illustration from an illustrious 
friend of mine, is like the effort of a man trying to lift himself 
by his own waistband. All that has been here said is to be taken 
in connection with this fundamental truth. When "nascent 
senses" are spoken of, when "the differentiation of a tissue at 
first vaguely sensitive all over" is spoken of, and when these 
processes are associated with "the modification of an organism 
by its environment," the same parallelism without contact, or 
even approach to contact, is implied. There is no fusion pos- 
sible between the two classes of facts — no motor energy in the 
intellect of man to carry it without logical rupture from the one 
to the other. 

Further, the doctrine of evolution derives man, in his totaHty, 



3i6 ^ JOHN TYNDALL 

from the interaction of organism and environment through 
countless ages past. The human understanding, for example — ■ 
the faculty which Mr. Spencer has turned so skillfully round 
upon its own antecedents — is itself a result of the play between 
organism and environment through cosmic ranges of time. 
Never surely did prescription plead so irresistible a claim. But 
then it comes to pass that, over and above his understanding, 
there are many other things appertaining to man whose pre- 
scriptive rights are quite as strong as that of the understanding 
itself. It is a result, for example, of the play of organism and 
environment that sugar is sweet and that aloes are bitter, that 
the smell of henbane differs from the perfume of a rose. Such 
facts of consciousness (for which, by the way, no adequate 
reason has ever yet been rendered) are quite as old as the under- 
standing itself; and many other things can boast an equally 
ancient origin. Mr. Spencer at one place refers to that most 
powerful of passions — the amatory passion — as one which, 
when it first occurs, is antecedent to all relative experience what- 
ever ; and we may pass its claim as being at least as ancient and 
as valid as that of the understanding itself. Then there are 
such things woven into the texture of man as the feeling of awe, 
reverence, wonder — and not alone the sexual love just referred 
to, but the love of the beautiful, physical and moral, in nature, 
poetry, and art. There is also that deep-set feeling which, since 
the earliest dawn of history, and probably for ages prior to all 
history, incorporated itself in the religions of the world. You 
who have escaped from these religions in the high and dry 
light of the understanding may deride them; but in so doing 
you deride accidents of form merely, and fail to touch the im- 
movable basis of the religious sentiment in the emotional nature 
of man. To yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the 
problem of problems at the present hour. And grotesque in re- 
lation to scientific culture as many of the religions of the world 
have been and are — dangerous, nay, destructive, to the dearest 
privileges of freemen as some of them undoubtedly have been, 
and would, if they could, be again — it will be wise to recognize 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 317 

them as the forms of force, mischievous, if permitted to intrude 
on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command, 
but capable of being guided by liberal thought to noble issues 
in the region of emotion, which is its proper sphere. It is vain 
to oppose this force with a view to its extirpation. What we 
should oppose, to the death if necessary, is every attempt to 
found upon this elemental bias of man's nature a system which 
should exercise despotic sway over his intellect. I do not fear 
any such consummation. Science has already to some extent 
leavened the world, and it will leaven it more and more. I 
should look upon the mild light of science breaking in upon the 
minds of the youth of Ireland, and strengthening gradually to 
the perfect day, as a surer check to any intellectual or spiritual 
tyranny which might threaten this island than the laws of 
princes or the swords of emperors. Where is the cause of fear ? 
We fought and won our battle even in the Middle Ages : why 
should we doubt the issue of a conflict now? 

The impregnable position of science may be described in a 
few words. All religious theories, schemes, and systems, which 
embrace notions of cosmogony, or which otherwise reach into 
its domain, must, in so far as they do this, submit to the con- 
trol of science, and relinquish all thought of controlling it. Act- 
ing otherwise proved disastrous in the past, and it is simply 
fatuous to-day. Every system which would escape the fate of 
an organism too rigid to adjust itself to its environment must 
be plastic to the extent that the growth of knowledge demands. 
When this truth has been thoroughly taken in, rigidity will be 
relaxed, exclusiveness diminished, things now deemed essential 
will be dropped, and elements now rejected will be 'assimilated. 
The lifting of the life is the essential point ; and as long as dog- 
matism, fanaticism, and intolerance are kept out, various modes 
of leverage may be employed to raise life to a higher level. 
Science itself not unfrequently derives motive power from an 
ultra-scientific source. Whewell speaks of enthusiasm of temper 
as a hindrance to science ; but he means the enthusiasm of weak 
heads. There is a strong and resolute enthusiasm in which 



3i8 JOHN TYNDALL 

science finds an ally ; and it is to the lowering of this fire, rather 
than to a diminution of intellectual insight, that the lessening 
productiveness of men of science in their mature years is to be 
ascribed. Mr. Buckle sought to detach intellectual achieve- 
ment from moral force. He gravely erred; for without moral 
force to whip it into action, the achievements of the intellect 
would be poor indeed. 

It has been said that science divorces itself from literature. 
The statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowl- 
edge. A glance at the less technical writings of its leaders — of 
its Helmholtz, its Huxley, and its Du Bois-Reymond — would 
show what breadth of literary culture they command. Where 
among modern writers can you find their superiors in clearness 
and vigor of literary style? Science desires no isolation, but 
freely combines with every effort toward the bettering of man's 
estate. Single-handed, and supported not by outward sym- 
pathy, but by inward force, it has built at least one great wing 
of the many-mansioned home which man in his totality demands. 
And if rough walls and protruding rafter ends indicate that on 
one side the edifice is still incomplete, it is only by wise com- 
bination of the parts required with those already irrevocably 
built that we can hope for completeness. There is no necessary 
incongruity between what has been accomplished and what re- 
mains to be done. The moral glow of Socrates, which we all 
feel by ignition, has in it nothing incompatible with the physics 
of Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which he would 
hardly scorn to-day. And here I am reminded of one among 
us, hoary, but still strong, whose prophet voice some thirty 
years ago, far more than any other of this age, unlocked what- 
ever of life and nobleness lay latent in its most gifted minds — 
one fit to stand beside Socrates or the Maccabean Eleazar, and 
to dare and suffer all that they suffered and dared — fit, as he 
once said of Fichte, "to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and 
to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the groves of Aca- 
deme." With a capacity to grasp physical principles which his 
friend Goethe did not possess, and which even total lack of 



THE BELFAST ADDRESS 319 

exercise has not been able to reduce to atrophy, it is the world's 
loss that he, in the vigor of his years, did not open his mind and 
sympathies to science, and make its conclusions a portion of 
his message to mankind. Marvelously endowed as he was — 
equally equipped on the side of the heart and of the understand- 
ing — he might have done much toward teaching us how to rec- 
oncile the claims of both, and to enable them in coming times 
to dwell together in unity of spirit and in the bond of peace.^ 

And now the end is come. With more time, or greater strength 
and knowledge, what has been here said might have been better 
said, while worthy matters here omitted might have received fit 
expression. But there would have been no material deviation 
from the views set forth. As regards myself, they are not the 
growth of a day ; and as regards you, I thought you ought to 
know the environment which, with or without your consent, is 
rapidly surrounding you, and in relation to which some adjust- 
ment on your part may be necessary. A hint of Hamlet's, how- 
ever, teaches us all how the troubles of common life may be 
ended ; and it is perfectly possible for you and me to purchase 
intellectual peace at the price of intellectual death. The world 
is not without refuges of this description ; nor is it wanting in 
persons who seek their shelter and try to persuade others to do 
the same. I would exhort you to refuse such shelter, and to 
scorn such base repose — to accept, if the choice be forced upon 
you, commotion before stagnation, the leap of the torrent before 
the stillness of the swamp. In the one there is at all events life, 
and therefore hope ; in the other, none. I have touched on de- 
batable questions, and led you over dangerous ground ; and this 
partly with the view of telling you, and through you the world, 
that as regards these questions science claims unrestricted right 
of search. It is not to the point to say that the views of Lucre- 
tius and Bruno, of Darwin and Spencer, may be wrong. Here 
I should agree with you, deeming it indeed certain that these 
views will undergo modification. But the point is, that, whether 
right or wrong, we claim the freedom to discuss them. The 
1 Tyndall refers here to Carlyle. — Editors. 



320 JOHN TYNDALL 

ground which they cover is scientific ground; and the right 
claimed is one made good through tribulation and anguish, in- 
flicted and endured in darker times than ours, but resulting in 
the immortal victories which science has won for the human race. 
I would set forth equally the inexorable advance of man's under- 
standing in the path of knowledge, and the unquenchable claims 
of his emotional nature which the understanding can never 
satisfy. The world embraces not only a Newton, but a Shake- 
speare ; not only a Boyle, but a Raphael ; not only a Kant, 
but a Beethoven; not only a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in 
each of these, but in all, is human nature whole. They are not 
opposed, but supplementary ; not mutually exclusive, but recon- 
cilable. And if, still unsatisfied, the human mind, with the 
yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will turn to the 
mystery from which it has emerged, seeking so to fashion it as 
to give unity to thought and faith — so long as this is done, 
not only without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with 
the enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of conception is 
here unattainable, and that each succeeding age must be held 
free to fashion the mystery in accordance with its own needs, 
then, in opposition to all the restrictions of Materialism, I would 
affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in con- 
trast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative facul- 
ties of man. Here, however, I must quit a theme too great for 
me to handle, but which will be handled by the loftiest minds 
ages after you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have 
melted into the infinite azure of the past. 



XI 

TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY i 
Charles Fletcher Dole 

[Charles Fletcher Dole (1845-) is a well-known New England clergy- 
man and a writer of note on religious and sociological subjects. He gradu- 
ated from Harvard in 1868 and from the Andover Theological Seminary in 
1872; four years later he became minister of the First Congregational 
Church (Unitarian), at Jamaica Plain, Boston, and has continued in that 
position to the present time. Dr. Dole has been actively identified with 
a number of religious and social movements and organizations, was Inger- 
soll lecturer at Harvard in 1906, and is the author of many books and 
articles in his special fields of interest. 

TrtUh and Immortality, published in the Harvard Theological Review for 
April, 1909, is a reasoned argument in support of the belief in a future 
life ; and as such, it may be taken as a reply to the philosophy of such men 
as Huxley and Tyndall, who find no justification in scientific truth for the 
hope of immortality. Dr. Dole argues that the hope of immortality, far 
from being without the province of truth, is, in fact, part and parcel of 
that province ; that it underlies our conception of an ordered and pur- 
poseful universe, and is essential to harmonious human development. 

Modern thought on the subject of future life by theologians, scientists, 
and philosophers, is admirably represented in the series of Ingersoll lectures 
which have been given annually at Harvard since 1896.] 

One everywhere finds people who have given up the hope of 
immortaUty or else regard it with extreme doubt. Forms of be- 
lief with which it has been associated have proved unthinkable 
to them. Worse yet, to hope for immortality seems not to be 
loyal to truth. "We want reality," they say. "We propose to 
face the facts ; we demand honest thinking. We have no use 
for dreams, however pleasant ; we wish only truth." Mr. Hux- 
ley's famous letter to his friend Charles Kingsley expresses 

^ Reprinted by permission from the Harvard Theological Review, April, 1909. 

321 



322 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

this attitude. Here is a man who, in the greatest of sorrows, 
feels obliged to put away comfort and hope in obedience to the 
demand of truth. It is not possible to divide his mind into ex- 
clusive compartments, and to indulge an ancient religious emo- 
tion on one side of himself, while on the other side he remains 
the conscientious student of science. He must keep his integ- 
rity at any cost to his feelings. No one can help admiring this 
type of mind. A multitude of people who have nothing like 
Mr. Huxley's rigor of conscience are immensely moved by the 
attitude of such men as he. If he could see no truth in immor- 
tality and had to remain an agnostic about it, why should we 
not be agnostics also ? 

I believe that Mr. Huxley was right in his insistence upon 
truth and conscience. I believe also that he was mistaken as 
to the relation between truth and the hope of immortality. I 
shall try to show in this paper that the hope of immortality, so 
far from being excluded from the realm of truth and reahty, is 
involved in th^ essential structure of this realm. I shall have 
occasion to point out considerations to which I see no evidence 
that Mr. Huxley (and I use his name as the type of a consider- 
able class) ever paid attention. The fact is, that the thinking 
men of the last century suffered an immense reaction in the tide 
of the new thoughts that came in with the scientific period of 
development. The first net impression was the sense of a loss 
of the fabric of ancient traditions and religions. It was not easy 
immediately to adjust one's eyes to the new light and to esti- 
mate what kind of a universe had been brought to view. I 
cannot doubt that if such minds as Mr. Huxley had only gone 
on to urge their splendid courage and loyalty a few steps farther, 
they would have come to the same constructive conclusions 
which their somewhat cautious negative work has vastly helped 
us of a later generation to reach. 

Let us, however, put aside the subject of immortality for a 
while, and first ask the straight question : What is truth ? Or, 
what constitutes reality ? As with most ultimate questions, this 
is not easy precisely to say. The ultimate things appear always 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 323 

to be larger than our definitions. In a general and quite un- 
dogmatic sense we may say that truth is that which fits into its 
place or order. The untrue is that which does not fit, or match. 
We are using here a parable taken from outward things, but 
our thinking is none the worse because it falls into this form 
of illustration. Does not all thinking proceed by figures and 
symbols ? 

We make a simple statement : The earth is round. This is 
true, so far as the description "round" fits the shape of the 
earth. We know that it is not exactly true. Why is it not 
quite true ? Because we have an idea of perfect roundness into 
which the earth, as it is, does not fit. We describe an occurrence, 
an accident perhaps, which we have witnessed. Our account 
may possibly express our view of the facts. Yet we can almost 
never make our description tell the exact story of what happened. 
Our senses are imperfect instruments of observation; our 
memories may play us false ; our language is only a makeshift, 
and never quite conveys even our imperfect impressions of an 
event. Neither do our words — a system of makeshift symbols 
— always mean the same thing to another as they mean to us. 
No two pairs of eyes perhaps witness exactly the same occur- 
rence. The question already begins to arise : Why, since the 
truth is so elusive, should we be so strenuous to insist upon it ? 

Our idea of reality is involved with our notion of truth. We 
hold that, behind impressions and sensations and the words that 
describe our feelings about things, there is some substance (call 
it matter or spirit as you please) which, so far as our descrip- 
tion of it is exact, corresponds to, or matches with, the descrip- 
tion. We do not pretend that we know or can know this sub- 
stance, as it is, but we think or assume that we know it at least 
in the form of its relations to us, and that its relations, as we 
discover them, translate the reality on the whole fairly well, as 
if by picture language, for all practical purposes. 

We assume, too, or surmise (may we dare to say that we know ?) 
that everything in this realm of reality that lies just behind all 
phenomena is related or matched together with everything else. 



324 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

To know the truth would be to know how things fit or are re- 
lated together. To know all about a grain of sand would thus 
be to know all about the world. At any rate the phenomena 

— the picture language with which our minds are impressed 
through our eyes and ears and nerves of sense — come to us in 
the most elaborate network of relations, sometimes of mere juxta- 
position, sometimes in relations of what we call cause and effect, 
always in a certain succession in time, always also suggestive 
of a unity, or order, or harmony, to which, if we knew enough, 
all would be found to belong. In other words, we surmise that 
truth, if we could get at it, would be the complete description of 
the order and unity of the world in and through all its parts and 
its motions. 

We are now saihng audaciously over great depths in thought. 
If any one cares to object and question : How dare you surmise 
and assume so much ? How dare you speak of fitnesses and order 
and relations of unity? we have to reply that we cannot help 
making these bold assumptions if we are going to think at all, 
or to investigate, or even to live sanely. Our interest and im- 
pulse to observe, and still more to try to order our observations 
into the form of science, spring from our conviction, or faith, 
that there is order and significance and unity to be discovered 

— in other words, that this is not chaos in which we live, but a 
universe. This is a faith; it certainly is not "solid fact" or 
knowledge. But the very idea of truth is bound up with the 
faith. If there were no reality corresponding to our view of 
things, if things did not fit together so as to spell out into intel- 
ligible meanings, if the net impression of the world was only an 
ash heap and not a universe, what possible sense would there be 
in urging the necessity of truth ? Truth is a postulate of faith, 
albeit an intellectual and not a supernatural kind of faith. 

We know more about our own minds than we know of anything 
outside of us. Our minds impose certain forms of thinking upon 
us. Our minds instinctively work on the lines of order. They 
tend to expect relations of fitness and harmony. They are 
prompted by all kinds of stimuli to set up standards and ideals. 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 325 

They act under certain universal categories to inquire, Where ? 
When ? Why ? To use a figure of speech, we may say that they 
behave like a kaleidoscope, which, turn it as you will, imposes 
color and order on the material within it. So it is the nature of 
intelligence to reflect everything which falls upon its mirror in 
forms of order. The mind seems to be made to construct, that 
is, to fit its material together, as a poet or architect does. The 
intelligence looks for and expects significance and unity. Even 
before it gets demonstration, it tends to proceed on its faith that 
its world is reasonable, or, at least, that there is a standard of 
reason and fitness into which, if things do not match, they are 
futile. Yes. Even when the doubting mind in its pessimist 
mood pronounces the world an illusion, or when the agnostic 
mind halts in doubt whether the universe means anything to 
man beyond his burial ground, this very pronouncement of des- 
peration proceeds on the marvelous conception of a possible 
world of order and beauty with which, as a standard, the actual 
world is tried and found wanting. 

Thus the most negative "truth" gets its meaning out of the 
depths of an intelligence that cannot help thinking in terms of 
reason and unity. Why tell the dismal truth, some one asks, that 
all things are vanity ? Because the mind conceives the idea of 
a real world which puts a vain world to shame. It is the faith 
in at least the possibility of a real world that gives character to 
criticism, blasphemy, and denial. 

What we call "reality," at every point, when we try to ap- 
proach it, proves to be beyond anything that we distinctly 
know or can define. Our thought of it arises, indeed, out of the 
region of our senses and by the aid of our instruments of research. 
It begins with " solid facts " (which are not solid at all, but merely 
our consciousness of relations in phenomena) and passes over 
at once into a realm, absolutely necessary to our thinking and 
living, and yet always beyond the touch of our senses. We have 
so many things, a, b, c, etc., given us as our working material, 
and presently we find x, y, z, into which the simple deliverances 
of our senses have been irresistibly transformed. The realm of 



326 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

what we call known values in things is not so real or necessary to 
us as is this realm of thoughts, of order, of fitnesses and unity, 
with which alone truth is concerned. Truth is thus always 
a -\- xoT b -^ 7,; that is, the thing we get by our senses plus what 
our minds make of it by the act of the faith of reason, in trying 
to fit it as well as we can into a place in our realm of reaUty. 

See how true this is in the very beginnings of our thought of 
the visible world. We call a stone hard and rough. This is 
the a and b of our knowledge. But we go a step further, and 
every atom of the stone is in motion. These atoms are unknown 
creations, x and y. We try to catch the atoms and weigh them 
and tell in how large platoons they march together. Presently 
we are not contemplating atoms at all, in the sense of hard bits 
of stuff. We are in the presence of infinitesimal tornadoes of 
force. Whatever now we decide to call this substance of the 
rock, whether matter, or atoms, or centers of force, or spirit, it is 
the name for our faith in an almighty and wonderful reality 
rather than an exact description of a solid fact that we know all 
about. Our conclusion — that is, the truth about matter — is 
the best makeshift or working theory that we can reach to fit to- 
gether our experiences of what matter does for us. Truth chal- 
lenges our modesty as much as the accuracy of our observation 
and description. 

Take another simple statement of fact. We say that a certain 
line drawn on the paper is not straight. How do we know this ? 
No one of us has ever seen a perfect line; yet we carry in our 
minds the idea of straightness, or of circularity, which has only 
been suggested to us, but never realized. In the realm of our 
thought, the idea of the straight line or the perfect circle is essen- 
tial. It is more real, though invisible, than any line that we see. 
We are so made that, while intelligence survives, this idea will 
five with us when all visible lines are expunged. Truth in lines 
and forms is measured by this ideal and most actual standard. 
However this standard may have grown out of our experience, it 
always transcends experience. It is indeed a necessity of our 
thought. 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 327 

We catch sight now of a group of standards and ideals, all 
different from the actual "facts" of life, related to the facts, sug- 
gested perhaps by the facts, but always above the facts, and quite 
as essential to our practical use of the facts as the yardstick or 
the standard pound is essential in buying and selling. Every 
utility or convenience, a comfortable dwelling, a hygienic system 
of plumbing, a proper suit of clothes or pair of shoes, presupposes 
an ideal, invisible standard of thoroughness and excellence of 
workmanship. We say that the suit fits ; we say that the founda- 
tion wall is true. We proceed at every practical issue by ideal 
standards which no work of man ever completely reached. The 
ideal of what a house or a ship should be is more real than the 
actual construction. Moreover, we believe that, if we knew 
more, we should see even a nobler ideal of fitness and truth than 
that by which we now measure our workmanship. Our ideal is 
like the asymptote, always approximating, but never quite touch- 
ing, the invisible ultimate ideals toward which our faith, guided 
by each new access of experience, climbs. 

We are introduced immediately into the realm of beauty. To 
the eyes of the artist or poet there is nothing so actual as the vi- 
sion of beautiful objects that the visible universe only suggests, 
but never quite realizes, or can realize, in material form. Our 
true humanity has not begun till we love these visions of beauty 
and strive to keep their company. Thus, there is nothing in the 
world more wonderful and mysterious than the facts, the forms, 
and the power of music. It arises out of noises and sound waves, 
but it consists in harmonies which ally it to the ideal kingdom of 
mathematics. Its delight is in the fact that it fits and satisfies 
our ears. It demands truth or fidelity in the musician ; it de- 
pends upon the attunement and the perfect time of his instrument. 
The standard is always beyond his best effort. This standard, 
which no man ever reaches, is more real than any of his work. 

Why must the artist or the musician obey the law of this quite 
ideal vision or standard ? Why must the violinist play up to a 
degree of perfection that no one can reach? Why must the 
painter follow his vision, though he may never be thanked or re- 



328 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

warded, and though the work of the "pot-boiler" may bring him 
cheap fame and pay? The fact is that man, at his best, be- 
longs to an ideal world, which, once being entered upon, becomes 
more real than the solid ground under his feet. There is no 
truth, except within this region of invisible realities. 

All the moralities now face us with their commanding pres- 
ences. "Duty, stern daughter of the voice of God," is here. 
Conscience sets up its imperative, the strange word "ought." 
We can get along quite well for a little way with a superficial ex- 
planation of morality. We may say that it is merely customary 
conduct, imitating the traditions and usages of a tribe or a fam- 
ily. We may say that it arises out of social expediency. All 
this is true. The point which we urge is that all morality, how- 
ever simply it arises, moves up into the realm of ideal values. In 
other words, truth in morals is more than the mere fitness of an 
action to a custom or tradition or an act of legislation ; it is the 
effort to fit a standard or ideal that no words, least of all the 
terms of an enactment, can define. Take Mr. Haeckel's in- 
sistence upon the scientist's duty to say what he thinks. You 
cannot measure this duty in terms of expediency, any more than 
you can rate a beautiful painting in so many dollars. You can- 
not prescribe how far the scientist must go in his telling the truth, 
any more than you can say how far the musician shall go in his 
effort after perfection of tone and harmony. You cannot prove 
that it will do Mr. Haeckel any material good to tell the truth, 
or even that his truth will do the world any good. Yet we all 
agree with Mr. Haeckel that he must tell the truth, even if the 
whole world holds up its hands in horror at him. This idea of 
an absolute or infinite duty to truth is in another realm from that 
of the "soHd facts" of the man on the street. It belongs in the 
realm of the ideal and invisible, and what, for want of any better 
term, we call the spiritual. But the man on the street applauds 
it, and believes in it, and owns that it is more real and permanent 
than the stones under his feet. Yes, it is a part of his being.^ 

' The lack of clear recognition of the fundamental idea of truth in Mr. 
William James's Pragmatism is perhaps the chief fault in his treatment. 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 329 

Consider, again, the ideal of wedded love. There is nothing 
that we behold more real and yet more wonderful. It has its 
rise on the animal side of us. It is related to the bodily senses 
and to passion. It has a strange, gross, sensual history of ages 
behind it. It hardly yet more than fairly emerges into the higher 
consciousness of the average man. The woman is still a chattel 
or plaything in the eyes of multitudes of brutish men. Never- 
theless, here stands the ideal of true marriage and a love mutual, 
loyal, devoted, constant, undying, which no two lovers ever 
succeeded altogether in compassing, yet without which real love 
hardly exists. This love already orders thousands of homes. It 
commands the consciences of a host of people who only feebly 
Uve up to its splendid "ought." It brings joy and satisfaction 
wherever men and women obey it. Under its beneficent rule, 
the passions and senses themselves are at their highest perfec- 
tion of use, and children are born under auspices most favorable 
for their health and happiness. The word "home" gets all its 
wealth of significance from this ideal reality of love. 

What, now, is truth in the marriage relation ? It does not 
merely mean to hold to a verbal promise or to obey the laws of 
the state. It means nothing less than fitness of act and thought, 
and of temper also, to an ideal standard beyond and above all 
words. Once seeing this ideal, we become base and unworthy 
to fall away from it. Who in England had a loftier sense of this 
reality than Mr. Huxley had ? What a world of ethical reality 
he lived in and belonged to ! 

Consider a moment the almost new sense of humane social re- 
lations that slowly tends to prevail among men. You can al- 
ways make out a case for the grim rule of selfishness, more or less 
enlightened. You can say that the law of life is the survival of 
the fittest ; you can translate human realities into animal, mili- 
tary, and commercial terms. You can say, "Every man for 
himself," and "Every man has his price." Why is it that no 
man can ever be content in saying such things ? No man who is 
a man really believes that these things are quite true. What, 
then, do we all, at our best, hold to be true of social relations ? 



330 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

We believe in an unwritten law, quite ideal, beyond the range 
of all human rewards or penalties. This law bids us each and 
all to share our good things with one another ; it bids us be ready 
to suffer and die for the common good — not merely for the na- 
tion, but for humanity, for those whom we have never seen, for 
those unborn. It bids us let our own selfish will go, in the name 
of a universal good will. It sets up martyrs rather than kings, 
Jesus rather than Caesar, Lincoln and not Napoleon, for the ad- 
miration of the world There is no true man who does not, at 
his best, bow to this kind of ideal. Here is a touch of the infinite 
in man. There is no finite range to the bounds of his duty. 

There is a philosophy that undertakes to explain everything 
in terms of mechanics. Whatever a man does, or thinks, or feels 
is registered in the changes of motion in nerve cells. First comes 
the change in a cell, as the man's senses are moved from without 
and then, as if pulled by a wire, thought and consciousness follow. 
No one doubts the fact of this registry of deeds and thoughts. 
Does it explain anything ? Does it not rather leave a world of 
mystery still to be explained ? For consciousness is infinitely 
more wonderful than motion or mechanics, which in no way ex- 
plain consciousness. The great overpowering fact of life is not 
the mechanical motion in a man's brain, but the vast range of 
his consciousness. His life, however related to the brain cells, 
is not real life at all till it rises into consciousness. All reality, 
in fact, Ues in the field of consciousness, without which we could 
not even know anything about the mechanics of motion or the 
elementary differences between greater and less, higher and lower, 
better and worse. 

Moreover, so far as consciousness tells any truth, it tells us of 
moral and spiritual sequences that daily alter the flow of our lives, 
and in the aggregate make and alter the meaning of history. 
The story of a hero, a bit of a psalm, " a passage from Euripides," 
strikes our consciousness, and we become, at least for the moment, 
changed men in our conduct. The alteration of conduct, itself 
touching material facts, perhaps costing hard-earned money, or 
risking labor and life, is a spiritual or humane or social change 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 331 

in us. Its value consists in ideal terms, such as happiness, con- 
tentment, satisfaction. 

We have used the word "happiness." What is this thing that 
everyone wants, that no one can exactly define, that begins in 
the plane of creature comforts, and rises into all manner of ideal 
relations ? Our thought of what truth is helps us to answer this 
question. Truth is fitness, harmony, the unison of relations. 
The happy life, then, is the life in which all the parts fit and 
match and make unity. The body is well and serves the man ; 
the mind is sane, the conscience is enlightened and prompt to 
act, the man is full of good will, expressing itself in kindly words 
and generous deeds. In short, the happy life conforms to, and 
corresponds with, an ideal beyond and above itself, never yet 
exactly seen, but the most real furniture that exists in every ma- 
ture man's consciousness. The perfect truth of manhood is 
more than the man reaches, yet the reality of the man himself 
consists in his reaching toward this truth and trying to fit himself 
to it. His highest satisfaction lies in this effort. In this type of 
effort all the experiences of his life, even his failures and sorrows, 
tend to blend and harmonize into the unity of a real person. 
Consciousness tells us nothing more sure than this, and the more 
surely, the more often we have made the endeavor. We are 
happy, we reach approximate unity, in and through every mo- 
ment of hearty good will. To be true to a man's standard of 
manhood is the essence of the happy life. 

Here again, as before, truth is both a and x. It is that which 
fits facts which we have experienced, and it is also an item of 
faith or venture ; it is that which fits into an ideal beyond actual 
experience. This transcendental element of truth, this venture 
from the known towards the higher and unknown, is precisely 
what gives truth its character of reality. 

Another idea has been, and is still, immensely important as a 
factor in the highest human activity. It is the idea of progress. 
It is related intimately to the great scientific thought of develop- 
ment and evolution. Men think that the world is better than it 
once was, and they believe or hope that it will grow better. This 



332 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

is not an unpractical thought. It adds value, worth, and motive 
force to action. It is a spur to morality and the noblest forms of 
devotion. The world and human life are worth more in a world 
that grows better than in a world that has stopped growing and 
may even be on the decline. Though I ought to be just, float- 
ing on a raft and waiting to be annihilated, yet I can have no 
enthusiasm for justice in such a condition. Give me the hope 
that my justice may bring rescue from the raft, even though to 
save others at my own loss, and my whole soul rises to do justice. 
So men are stirred to activity in the hope of human progress, not 
for their own sake, but for generations to come. This hope of 
progress moreover is illimitable. Draw a line anywhere and 
put an end to it ; translate the efforts of men into any final form 
of death, however many thousands of years away, and the heart 
goes out of their work. There is an infinite element in the 
thought. It seems to point to something beyond the terms of 
mortal life. It is not a, however multiplied, but a plus x. The 
unknown part of it makes it true. 

We have already suggested the bold but quite necessary ven- 
ture of thought that we make in speaking of a world-order, or 
"universe." We thereby express our faith that all things fit to- 
gether and make one world. Thus all the sciences are one science. 
Thus all processes are a part of a universal order. This is faith 
or trust quite as much as knowledge. But, as Mr. Tyndall has 
happily shown, science proceeds by leaps of inspired imagination, 
and arrives at its conclusions in advance of its ammunition trains 
and baggage wagons. Thus faith proceeds in the face of super- 
ficial difficulties. At first blush no one sees a universe, but rather 
the theater of confhcting powers. The savage's gods are in con- 
flict. Yet we hold, for substance of truth, that all forces are one. 
Doubt this, and the universe itself begins to dissolve, and truth 
to disintegrate. 

The mightiest of all generalization follows, inextricably in- 
volved throughout with all that we have said. It is the thought 
of God. The word or name is of little moment. We take such 
words as we have at hand — only symbols at best for a concep- 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 333 

tion which no words can do more than suggest. Our thought 
of God is only the extension and perfecting of our vision of a 
world-order or universe. It is equally necessary ; it grows out 
of the other ; it is born of and arises out of our science and ex- 
perience. It seems compelled upon us by our thought, unless 
we stop thinking altogether. 

Our thought of God is the expression of our sense of the neces- 
sary unity of all the values, ideals, and standards which give 
meaning to life. Order, beauty, intelligence, goodness, truth, love, 
are so many names of God. They all seem to go together. The 
realm of beauty is not alien to the realm of righteousness, but one 
with it. The realm of things — atoms, forces, motions — is not 
alien to the realm of consciousness, thought, order, ideals, jus- 
tice, goodness, but subsidiary to it and one with it. 

This carries us further. The thought of God means that the 
world outside and within, phenomena and consciousness also, 
is significant. It is an intelligible world — intelligence appealing 
to, and reflected upon, intelligence. This is the idea that men 
have expressed in the thought of a purposeful world. They have 
meant to express the conviction that no blind fate, but an all- 
inspiring reason, ruled the universe. They meant a conviction 
that the universe is good, not evil — good in its whirling forces, 
good on the side of its omnipresent beauty, good in the working 
of its supreme intelligence. They meant that even seeming evil 
will be found, when once we know enough, to fall under the com- 
pelling law of good. 

This is bold to think, but necessary if we think at all. We 
may not say that we know God instinctively. But we are com- 
pelled by the quality and framework of our intelligence to think 
in the terms that sooner or later signify God. The thought of 
God, in the ultimate analysis, is imposed on our thinking, first, 
as crudely suggested by the facts of life ; then, as a form of in- 
tellectual faith ; then, next, as required to meet the demands of 
that ideal realm of ethics and truth to which as men we belong. 
World forces running to evil, a universal intelligence without 
purpose or meaning, consciousness everywhere yet void of reality, 



334 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

beauty everywhere expressing nothing real behind it, morality, 
virtue, conscience, and duty in us pressing us to be willing to die 
for a principle or an ideal, and yet nothing moral in the universe 
to match with and correspond to this universal pressure; love 
in us rising to a sense of infinite devotion, and no infinite love 
above or beyond us — these things do not fit together, are not 
intelligible, do not therefore make truth. Our thought of God 
is our way of afiirming that the universe is real, is one, is beauti- 
ful, is good, is enduring. 

This faith in the truth of the universe, that is, in God, is akin 
to the faith that we have in ourselves. We are a mystery and 
enigma to ourselves. Where are we ? Who are we ? What are 
the bounds of our personality? How can we be described or 
defined ? And yet we believe in ourselves, the invisible persons, 
inhabiting space, using atoms and forces, and dwelling in con- 
sciousness. We believe in ourselves, the microcosms, much as 
we believe in God as the universal order. We are what we are, 
and real persons, by virtue of thought, beauty, good will, unified 
together and entering into a vast conscious or vital order of good- 
ness. 

We deny God, and we presently cut at the roots of our faith in 
ourselves. What is real, if the universe is not real ? What is 
good, if the life out of which we spring and of which man at his 
best is the highest and most illustrative fruitage that we know, 
is not good ? What is worth while — science, or justice, or love, 
much less food and comfort — unless the standards hold good by 
which we set values ? Now God is our name for the standards 
that give life its meaning. 

We have taken a very long circle to reach the idea of immor- 
tality. But here at last it stands, as inevitable as any of the 
other items of reality which go to constitute life. Truth, we see, 
is that which fits and makes harmony and unity. It is whatever 
is necessary to make the order of thought complete It is what- 
ever belongs to the realm of reality. Truth is not merely what 
we see embodied, but beyond our immediate sight — what our 
faith in the ultimate reality foresees by anticipation. This fact 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 335 

has held good at every step which we have taken. Truth was 
always more than we could define or demonstrate. It was also 
what our intelligence demanded in order to fit things together 
and make sense of them. 

It need not disturb us in the least to be told how the hope of 
immortality may have arisen. Grant that it had its origin in 
material sensations, in the visions of savages, in the repeating of 
ghost stories. What human thought, art, or science, did not 
thus spring out of the earth, and take material shape to clothe 
itself ? The indisputable fact remains that there is an immate- 
rial, and yet real, order of life, which characterizes man as human. 
There is a hierarchy of values, leading up to the True, the Good, 
the Beautiful. We cannot throw them aside or contemn them, 
and keep our humanity. We cannot belittle truth or reason 
and logic — the architect's plan of the Cologne Cathedral, the 
builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, the painter of the Dresden Ma- 
donna, the exiles for conscience' sake who founded America, the 
integrity of honest fathers, the love of our mothers, the death on 
the Cross. "Here are the infinite values," say all of us, or else 
we cease to be men. 

We belong to a kingdom of values, an order of good, a uni- 
verse. Grant this. What of it ? We cannot think then that a 
man dies like a fly, and that is the end of him. We cannot think 
that the sweet mothers, and the brave, true-hearted men whom 
we have known, are of no more use in the order of the universe 
than the whirling dust in the streets. We cannot think that the 
life of this planet, with its gigantic cost in blood and sorrow and 
tears, with its glorious victories of truth, freedom, justice, and 
love, will all be measured up, in a few thousands of years, in the 
mute story of the moon — a dead world without a conscious 
intelligence to shed a tear over it. This is to pronounce the doom 
of the universe, to break the order and beauty, to bring intelli- 
gence to confusion, to deny serious values, and to dethrone 
reality. 

The intellect in us, the sense of right, the instinct for order, 
the love of beauty and goodness — all that makes us worthy as 



336 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

men — the reality in us reacts against an unreal world. The 
hope of immortality is our sense that the world may be trusted, 
that the real values abide, that the sum of all life is not death, 
but life yet more noble. 

This is not a strange and unscientific statement. It is quite 
like the statement of our senses touching the straightness of a line 
or the beauty of a face. We know it, but we cannot prove it to a 
blind man. The standard of our judgment is in our own nature. 
The one thing is true or fits, and the opposite does not fit or cor- 
respond. We cannot help trusting this judgment. It is all that 
we have to trust. Moreover, in this instance, as with the judg- 
ment of the line or of a righteous act, there tends to be a great and 
growing consensus of similar judgment. The same mind every- 
where tends to see something real in the hope of immortality. 

Another harmony now appears. We have seen that a man 
has a certain integrity as a person. At his best, all his powers 
working in unison, he is at the acme of efficiency and happiness. 
Three great spiritual elements go to make such a man. One 
is faith, or trust, for example, in the validity of law, in the essen- 
tial righteousness of the world, in the humanity of one's fellow- 
men — ^ in a word, in a good God. Another element of the com- 
plete life is love, or good will. The man at his best pours out, 
or expresses, his good will in all his acts and words, in his face 
and gestures. Again, the man needs hope in order to be at his 
best. He will work best, he will best keep his health, he will do 
most good to his fellows, he will be most truly a man with hope 
in his eyes. 

We do not say what the object of his hope must be. It surely 
need not be selfish or personal. But it must be worthy of his 
manhood and fit the terms of manhood. We will not insist that 
his hope shall rest on the idea of immortality. But it must rest 
on reality. It needs to go up into the ideal realm of values, 
where the idea of the infinite and the immortal belong. The 
man cannot be satisfied for long with any hope that is sentenced 
to ultimate death. 

Now we hold that whatever is essential to the best and most 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 337 

harmonious life of a man, without which he is reduced in his 
manhood, deserves to be trusted as true or real. The immense 
presumption is in its favor. If hope is one element of life, then 
there is that which corresponds to hope. The hope is entitled 
to "the benefit of the doubt." If a grand hope is needful to a 
noble life, then we hold that whatever substance corresponds to 
the hope will be noble also. True, this is faith again ; but the 
same kind of faith which we have found to be inseparable from 
all valid thinking. 

We are often asked if we can believe in personal immortahty. 
The truth is that in the highest region of thought all terms and 
definitions are inadequate. We felt this even in our glimpse 
at the mystery of substance, or matter. We use the terms atoms 
and wave motions and vortices, not as sufficient to express the 
reality, but as the best modes of imaging to ourselves the nature 
of the reality in which, in some sense, we firmly believe. Sub- 
stance, we say, seems to behave like groupings of orderly atoms, 
or like whirling forces. It behaves as if waves traversed it. So 
we say with the use of the term "personal immortality." This 
is the best form of thought we know to express our sense of 
the abiding reality of a noble life. Thus In Memoriam rises, 
in the face of all doubt, to the conviction that the loved friend 
can never die. As we see no other way to conceive of substance 
except under the figure of some form which we know, so we see 
no possible way to conserve immortal values in persons except 
what we name personal immortality. As substance may prove 
to be more valid and wonderful than any of our figures of speech, 
so immortality may prove to be richer and more satisfying than 
our name for it suggests. We cannot believe it to be less than 
our name for it. Meanwhile we have to go on using the words 
that serve to convey the utmost positive sense of reality. That 
they are popular words does not hurt their value, but rather 
enhances it. Why should not the popular instinct go in the 
direction of the best constructive and philosophical thought ? 
Here is another fitness or harmony such as we find everywhere in 
our world. What kind of philosophy — that is, love of truth — 



338 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

would it be that proved to serve no end except to destroy man's 
sense of worth and reality ! This would be, in the name of truth, 
to deny the existence of truth. 

We have proceeded very much as men do in building a struc- 
ture, for example, an archway. We have used the best material. 
We have set the base of our structure into the concrete matter 
of all sorts of facts of life. We have laid logic and reason for 
foundation stones. We have built the values of order, beauty, 
justice, truth, humanity, and love into our work. We have 
found a place for every noble experience of sympathy, of sorrow, 
of victory, for every aspiration, for every mighty standard. All 
the high things that make life worth living are in our structure. 
The name of the structure is the universal life ; it means the in- 
tegrity of man and the reality of God. 

There is just one stone which we need to make the arch com- 
plete. It is the keystone of the work. It is small, compared 
with the massive foundation ; one might possibly think that the 
columns would stand apart by themselves. They would stand 
for a while if no great stress were put on the work. But our 
sense of form and perfection, that is, our sense of truth or fitness, 
calls for the keystone in order to join the piers and springers 
together. Our sense of necessity also and our knowledge of the 
action of forces call for the keystone. Our arch will never be 
safe till we have put that one binding stone into place. 

So we judge of the hope of immortality. It belongs with and 
fits into a structure ; it is that without which you can never make 
the beauty or unity last, without which also the structure tends 
to fall apart. The arch is not yet true till every stone fits into 
place. Put the hope of immortality into the crown of the values 
of life, and they cohere, and all of them take on new significance. 
Each ston? built into the structure is worth more than it is worth 
by itself in the field. Each stone is worth still more when the 
structure is finished. Refuse your keystone the place for which 
it seems to be fitted exactly, and you have put every precious 
value at risk. You are not so sure of a good God any longer. 
Human life is no longer so sisrnificant as it was before. You have 



TRUTH AND IMMORTALITY 339 

lost worth out of love and friendship, and leveled them toward 
the dust. You have reduced patriotism and philanthropy to 
finite values, each with its price. You have taken buoyant joy 
and enthusiasm out of all mature men's Hfe, and threatened them 
with an earlier old age. You have shaken the bases of morality 
and put righteousness into terms of comfort and policy. You 
have bidden the artist, the poet, and the prophet laugh at their 
visions and doubt their vaHdity. You have distinctly shaken 
man's faith in logic and reason, and brought all intellectual pro- 
cesses into discredit. For all that logic is for is to bind things 
into coherence and unity. All values, in fact, belong in the 
ideal realm ; they go together and make a unity, or else they fall 
together. 

Fall together ? No ! No man can make the great values fall, 
or take them apart, or hurt one of them. A man can hurt and 
mar his own life by his distrust, but he can mar no reaUty. No 
man's doubt can make justice, beauty, truth, love, less than real. 
These things are ingrained in our nature. We need only to 
trust them. They constitute an infinite order. They validate 
themselves the more we throw our weight upon them. The 
hope of immortality is simply the keystone, which always stands 
fast, beyond any man's doubt, at the crown of the structure. It 
fits its companion values, and they clasp it with their arms into a 
serene integrity. They bid us trust our lives upon the archway, 
which every value in the universe has joined to construct. We 
did not build the beautiful structure : we only found it. 

What is excellent, 
As God lives, is permanent. 

I have wished to make it plain that the hope of immortality 
is not merely the concern of sentimentalists, ready to hug a 
pleasant delusion, much less of egoists, eagerly grasping after 
every straw of selfish comfort for themselves : it is the serious con- 
cern of all men who have other values at heart besides pleasures 
and money; of all who care for law and order, for true homes, 
for just government, and friendly society among men ; of all who 



340 CHARLES FLETCHER DOLE 

love their fellows and struggle for human progress, having faith 
that such struggle is worth while ; of all who love beauty, and 
find a noble worth in art and music ; of all who think sanely, and 
have any sort of faith in a good universe — the poets, the artists, 
the thinkers, the statesmen, the multitude also of modest and 
high-minded men and women whose religion consists in acts of 
faith, hope, and love. The companionship of such persons, the 
memory of such persons, their faith and their deeds, bring you 
into, and leave you in, an attitude of hope. This world would 
not be a quite true world with the hope of immortality left out. 
This world needs nothing less than the hope of immortality in 
order to complete its integrity. 



XII 

LAW AND JUSTICEi 
Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse 

[Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse (1864-) has been since 1907 professor of 
sociology in London University. His place in the world of contemporary 
thought is secured by unusual breadth of intellectual vision and remarkable 
command of branches of study collateral with those in which he is specially 
interested. As a philosopher he is known principally through his Theory of 
Knowledge, and as a psychologist, through his Mind in Evolution. His socio- 
logical studies, however, particularly Morals in Evolution and Social Evolu- 
tion and Political Theory, have probably brought his name more prominently 
before the intelligent reading public. It may be inferred from the titles of 
Professor Hobhouse's works that their strength lies in an exceptionally keen 
analysis of the bearing of evolutionary science upon the entire history of 
man and his institutions ; this is illustrated impressively in his use of an 
enormous mass of scientific evidence from fields whose connection with his 
own is not always apparent to the casual student, and whose whole domain 
can be covered only by a scholar of exceptional erudition. 

Law and Justice, which is the third chapter of Morals in Evolution, pub- 
lished in 1906, is an endeavor to trace from their beginnings in the most 
primitive society our modern conceptions of the legal and judicial func- 
tions of the state. It is necessary to call attention to the fact that a 
great amount of illustrative historical and anthropological evidence which 
is given as footnotes in Professor Hobhouse's volume has been omitted 
here. That these notes are both very valuable and very interesting goes 
without saying ; but their bulk makes it impossible to reproduce them in 
this volume, save in a few cases where they are quite indispensable to the 
text.] 

I. To the civilized man it seems the merest truism to say that 
the business of Government is to make and execute laws, to see 
that crime is suppressed, and that its subjects are maintained in 

' Reprinted by permission from Morals in Evolution, by L. T. Hobhouse 
(Henry Holt and Co.). 

341 



342 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

possession of their just rights. Not only so, but the broad lines 
upon which justice is administered are to him so familiar and seem 
so clearly marked out by reason and common sense that if he were 
to think of their origin at all he would naturally imagine that 
here, if anywhere, we had to do with simple and elementary moral 
ideas, implanted in men by nature, and needing no training nor 
experience to perfect them. Thus, what could be more obvious 
to begin with than the distinction of civil and criminal justice ? 
A may trespass upon the rights of B, but he may do so without 
fraud, violence, or any criminal intent. In such cases, the loss 
suffered by B must be made good, but no further punishment 
should fall upon A. That is, there is ground for a civil action. 
Or, on the other hand, in injuring B, A may have committed an 
offense against the social order. In that case he must be pun- 
ished as a criminal, and is not to escape merely by making good 
the loss inflicted on B. He has offended society, and society in- 
sists on punishing him. But, further, if A is a wrongdoer, it must 
be proved that he is a responsible agent. He must have done 
wrong with intention, and, if so, he alone ought to suffer. 
Socially, no doubt, his fall must affect his innocent wife and 
children, but this is a regrettable result, not a consequence which 
the law goes about to inflict. Lastly, whether in a civil or crimi- 
nal case, the function of the law is to set up an impartial author- 
ity, before whom the question is argued. Both sides are heard. 
Evidence is cited, and witnesses called, whose testimony the 
court is free to sift and weigh. Formalities and rules have to be 
observed, but apart, perhaps, from some which are archaic, they 
are devised mainly as safeguards against wrongful decisions, and 
the real business of the inquiry is to get at truth as to the mate- 
rial facts. In the end, the decision being given, the court can 
freely use the executive power of Government to enforce it. 

Elementary as all this sounds, it is, historically speaking, the 
result of a long evolution. The distinction between civil and 
criminal law, the principle of strictly individual responsibility, 
the distinction between the intentional and the unintentional, 
the conception of the court as an impartial authority to try the 



LAW AND JUSTICE 343 

merits of the case, the exclusive reliance on evidence and testi- 
mony, the preference of material to formal rectitude, the execu- 
tion of the court's decision by a public force — all are matters 
very imperfectly understood by primitive peoples, and their 
definite establishment is the result of a slow historical process. 
Perhaps no other department of comparative ethics gives so 
vivid an idea of the difficulty which humanity has found in 
establishing the simple elements of a just social order. 

2. The growth of law and justice is pretty closely connected 
in its several stages with the forms of social organization that 
have been described. In quite the lowest races there is, as we 
have seen, scarcely anything that is strictly to be called the 
administration of justice. Private wrongs are revenged by 
private individuals, and any one whom they can get to help 
them. The neighbors interfere in the least possible degree, 
and how far a man's family, or the wider group to which he 
belongs, will stand by him, is a question which is decided in 
each particular case as its own merits, or the inclinations of 
those concerned, direct. But even at a very low stage this 
uncertain and fitful action begins to take a more definite shape. 
We find something that corresponds roughly to our own adminis- 
tration of justice, and from the outset we find it in two broadly 
distinct cases. There are occasions upon which a whole com- 
munity will turn upon an offender and expel him, or put him to 
death. Sometimes, indeed, this is merely a kind of lynch law 
directed against a man who makes himself unbearable, or com- 
mits some crime which touches a general feeling of resentment 
into life. But beyond this there are at almost, if not quite, 
the lowest stages certain actions which are resented as involving 
the community as a whole in misfortune and danger. These 
include, besides actual treason, conduct which brings upon the 
people the wrath of God, or of certain spirits, or which violates 
some mighty and mysterious taboo. The actions most fre- 
quently regarded in this light are certain breaches of the mar- 
riage laws and witchcraft. The breaches of the marriage law 
which come in question here are confined to those transgres- 



344 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

sions'of the prohibitions of intermarriage, upon which primitive 
races lay such extraordinary stress. A mere violation of the 
marriage tie is generally in savage society a private matter, 
avenged by the husband alone, or by those whose duty it is to 
help him ; but a breach of the rules of exogamy,^ a marriage 
within the totem, for example, or a marriage outside the per- 
missible class, is regarded as an offense endangering the com- 
munity herself, and only to be wiped out by the extinction of the 
offender. A Central Australian tribe, for instance, which has no 
regular means of enforcing any law, will make up a war party 
to spear the man and woman who have married in defiance of 
these customs. Similarly, common action will often be taken to 
protect the community from \\itchcraft, obviously a terrible of- 
fense in a society which firmly believes in it. Among the 
North American Indians a public sentence was often pronounced 
and carried out by the chiefs in cases of sorcery, and sometimes 
also in cases of cowardice or breaches of the marriage customs. 
The punishment of witchcraft is as widespread as the fear of it, 
and, prompted as it is by the sense of a danger to the whole 
community, is often peculiarly ferocious, and directed to the 
destruction of every one connected with the offender. 

The object of the community in exterminating the criminal is 
not so much to punish the wicked man as to protect itself from 
a danger, or purge itself from a curse. Achan takes the accursed 
thing, the thing which had been devoted to Jahveh. The taboo 
on the thing devoted is at once communicated to Achan himself 
as though it were a poison or an infection, or, to take another 
metaphor, a charge of electricity. It passes from the spoil 
appropriated to the appropriator, and no resource remains but 
to devote Achan with all his family and belongings, everything, 
in fact, which the accursed thing had infected. The Roman 
criminal, if his offense bore a religious character, was "sacer" 
— separated from men, made over to the offended deities. His 
goods were set apart {consecratio bonorum) ,ior they were involved 

1 The custom of prohibiting marriage among members of the same tribe 
or clan. — Editors. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 345 

in his impurity. He was banished, so that none might come into 
contact with his accursed person. He was cut off from fire and 
water, not primarily because fire and water were necessary to 
his life, so that he was sentenced to death by being deprived of 
them, but rather for fear that his accursed touch should pollute 
the sacred elements and convey the pollution to others. That 
the criminal suffered in consequence was a satisfactory collateral 
effect, but the main thing was to secure the fire and water from 
pollution. 

Thus far, then, public punishments, where they are any more 
than an explosion of indignant feeling, may be regarded as public 
action taken for the sake of public safety. The community is 
threatened with palpable treason, or with occult magic influence, 
or by the wrath of the gods. It protects itself by destroying the 
traitor, or sacrificing, or, at any rate, getting rid of, the witch. 
It is a kind of pubHc hygiene rather than a dispensation of jus- 
tice which is in question. 

3. With the redress of wrongs, the maintenance of private 
rights, and the punishment of the bulk of ordinary offenses, it is 
different. For these purposes primitive society has no adequate 
organization. Administration of justice in this sense is in the 
main a private matter. It is for the sufferer to obtain redress 
or to avenge himself, and in the lowest stages of all the vengeance 
is, as we have seen, casual, arbitrary and unsystematized. But 
as the family and the clan acquire definite and coherent struc- 
ture a systematic method of redress grows up. The leading 
characteristics of this method are two — (i) that redress is 
obtained by retaliation, and (2) that owing to the sohdarity of 
the family the sufferer will find support in obtaining the redress 
that he seeks. The individual man, woman, or child no longer 
stands by himself or herself, but can count with considerable cer- 
tainty on the protection of his relatives, who are bound to avenge 
a wrong done to him, or to stand by him in exacting vengeance 
by every tie of honor and religion. In other words, this is the 
stage of the blood feud. "He that sheddeth man's blood, by 
man shall his blood be shed," is the earliest law given in the Old 



346 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

Testament, and on this point the Old Testament may be said 
to be a faithful reflection of the historical facts. 

Though the blood feud is an expression of vengeance, this ven- 
geance is by no means wholly without regulations and rules of 
its own. There is a rough justice recognizable in its working, 
though it is not the justice of an impartial third person surveying 
the facts as a whole. There is no question of a just judge ren- 
dering each man his due, but rather of a united kin sympathizing 
with the resentment of an injured relation when expressing itself 
in certain traditional forms. Justice as we understand it — the 
rendering to each man his due as judged by an impartial author- 
ity — is not distinctly conceived as a social duty in primitive 
ethics, and that is what, morally speaking, differentiates the 
primitive ethical consciousness from the ethical consciousness at 
a higher stage of development. Yet primitive ethics works upon 
rules in which a certain measure of justice is embodied. Thus in 
the first place custom prescribes certain rules of retaliation which 
are recognized as right and proper and have the approval of the 
neighbors and clansmen. The simplest and earliest of these 
rules is the famous Lex Talionis, "An eye for an eye, and a 
tooth for a tooth," familiar to us from thethapter of Exodus, but 
far earlier than Exodus in its first formulation. We find it, like 
many other primitive rules of law, in the recently discovered 
code of King Hammurabi, ^ which is earlier than the Book of the 
Covenant perhaps by 1300 years, and we find it at the present 
day among people sociologically at an earlier stage of develop- 
ment than the Babylonians of the third millennium before Christ. 
We find it applicable to bodily injuries, to breaches of the mar- 
riage law, and perhaps we may say in the rules of the twofold 
restitution for theft and in the symbolic form of mutilating the 
offending member even to the case of offenses against property. 
In some cases, the idea of exact retaliation is carried out with the 
utmost literalness — a grotesque literalness sometimes, as when 
a man who has killed another by falling on him from a tree is 
himself put to death by exactly the same method — a relation 
1 A Babylonian legal code of about 2250 B.C. — Editors. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 347 

of the deceased solemnly mounting the tree and much, one 
would say, at his own risk, descending upon the offender. More 
often, of course, vengeance is simpler. Stripes, mutilation, or 
death are inflicted without any attempt to imitate the original 
offense, though there may very well be a grading of the ven- 
geance in proportion to the original wrong. The homicide is 
slain, the adulterer speared, beaten, or mutilated, the thief slain, 
enslaved, or forced to make restitution, the defaulting debtor 
enslaved or flogged. 

4. But at a fairly early stage in the growth of social order a 
fresh principle is introduced tending to mitigate the blood feud 
and so maintain peace and harmony. For the special vice of the 
system of retaliation is that it provides no machinery for bringing 
the quarrel to an end. If one of the Bear totem is killed by a 
Hawk, the Hawk must be killed by one of the Bears, but it by 
no means follows that this will end the matter, for the Hawks 
may now stand by their murdered clansman and take the life 
of a second Bear in revenge, and so the game goes on, and we 
have a true course of vendetta. Accordingly, peaceable souls 
with a view to the welfare of both families, perhaps with the 
broader view of happiness and harmony within the community, 
intervene with a suggestion of peace. Let the injured Bears 
take compensation in another form, let them take cattle or other 
things to make good the loss of the pair of hands which served 
them. In a word, let the payment of damages be a salve to 
vindictive feelings. In that way, the incident may come to an 
end and peace will reign. When such a practice becomes a cus- 
tomary institution, we enter upon the stage of composition for 
offenses, a stage pecuUarly characteristic of the settling down of 
barbarous tribes into a peaceable and relatively civilized state, 
and especially of the growth of the power of a chief whose influ- 
ence is often exerted to enforce the expedient of composition 
upon a reluctant and revengeful family. As the institution takes 
shape a regular tariff is introduced, so much for an injury, so 
much for the loss of an eye, so much for a life. Often a distinc- 
tion between classes of crime appears. For some it is the rule 



348 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

that composition should be accepted. Others are recognized as 
too grave to be washed out except by blood. Thus among the 
German tribes murder and rape excited blood revenge, while other 
injuries were punishable by fine, and the fine is significantly 
called " faida," as being the feud commuted for money. The dis- 
tinction lasted into the Middle Ages, even in a period when the 
fine or a part of it went to the king. Our Leges Henrici still dis- 
tinguish emendable offenses, in which sacrilege and willful homi- 
cide without treachery are included, from unemendable offenses 
such as housebreaking, arson, open theft, aggravated homicide, 
treason against one's lord, and breach of the church's or the 
king's peace. These are crimes which in the Anglo-Saxon term 
had no bot — no bot or money payment atoned for them — 
they were bot-less, boot-less. Even when the bot was payable, 
it stood at first at the discretion of the injured family to accept 
or reject it, and we find the Germanic codes in the early Middle 
Ages setting themselves to insist on its acceptance as a means of 
keeping the peace. If the fine is not forthcoming, of course the 
feud holds. 

But when injuries are being assessed, not only must there be 
a distinction between the injuries themselves, but also between 
the persons injured. There must be a distinction of rank, age, 
sex; a free-born man is worth more than a slave, a grown-up 
person than a child, generally speaking, a man than a woman, a 
chief or person of rank than a free man. And so we have the 
system of " wergilds " ^ familiar to us in the early stages of our own 
history, and again recognizable in the code of Hammurabi. In 
one form or another the system of composition prevails or has 
prevailed almost to this day over a great part of the barbaric 
world, among the North American Indians, in the Malay Archi- 
pelago, in New Guinea, among the Indian hill tribes, among the 
Calmucks and Kirghis of the steppes of Asia, among the rude 
tribes of the Caucasus, the Bedouins of the Arabian desert, the 
Somali of East Africa, the negroes of the West Coast, the Congo 
folk of the interior, the Kaffirs and Basutos of the South. 
^ Payments to compromise the shedding of blood. — Editors. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 349 

5. Primitive vengeance, then, may be exacted by retaliation 
or compounded by money payments. In either method a rough 
justice is embodied, but it is justice enforced by the strong hand. 
Even graver dififerences separating barbaric vengeance from civi- 
lized justice have now to be mentioned. These differences are 
inherent in the nature of the social organization upon which the 
blood feud rests. For the blood feud is retribution exercised by 
a family upon a family ; it rests upon the support which each 
individual can count upon from his own immediate relations, 
possibly from his whole clan ; it rests, in a word, upon the 
solidarity of the kindred. But the effect of this solidarity upon 
the working of retributive justice is by no means wholly favor- 
able. In the first place it has the effect that the lives of members 
of other clans are held indifferent. A perfect illustration is af- 
forded by. the Ungani Nagas, a tribe of the northeast frontier of 
India, who live in villages composed of two or more "khels," 
as their clans are called, which, though living side by side and in- 
termarrying, are for purposes of defense independent communi- 
ties. A hostile tribe may descend upon the village and massacre 
all the members of one "khel" while the other "khels" sleep 
peacefully in their beds and do not raise hand or foot to protect 
their neighbors. This is cold-blooded, but it is not without a 
certain reason. The exterminated "khel" has incurred a feud 
from which the others are free. If they rise in its defense they 
not only incur the danger of the present fight, but they also in- 
volve themselves in the permanent feud. Next, in so far as 
justice rests on the blood feud, and the blood feud is of the nature 
of a private war between distinct families or clans, it follows that 
public justice will not deal with offenses committed within the 
family. These do not excite the blood feud. In some cases, no 
fixed punishment appears to be assigned for them, but this may 
happen not only because they do not belong to the province of 
public custom, but also, perhaps, because they are too rare for 
any definite custom to have arisen for dealing with them. Like 
parricide among the Romans, they represent the absolute ulti- 
mate of human wickedness. Further, generally speaking, there 



3 so LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOB HOUSE 

is no need for any recognizable general rule, because offenses 
within the family are dealt with by the arbitrary justice of the 
paterfamilias or of the kin collectively, who, even if other means 
of enforcing authority failed, have always the ready remedy of 
outlawry, which puts the offender at the mercy of the first comer. 
Outlawry from the clan is the most effective of all weapons, be- 
cause in primitive society the exclusion of a man from his kins- 
folk means that he is delivered over to the first comer absolutely 
without protection. An illustration may be drawn from the 
early history of Mohammed's teaching, when the Korais, who 
found that Mohammed's gospel was very inimical to their gains, 
wanted above all things to put him out of the way and made the 
most strenuous efforts to induce Mohammed's uncle, who was 
head of the clan, to disown him. Had the uncle consented, Mo- 
hammed would have been left without protection and rnight have 
been dispatched by any one without fear of consequences, but 
till the death of the uncle the clan stood by him ; and the leading 
men of Mecca, powerful as they were, were not bold enough to 
take upon themselves a blood feud with Mohammed's family. 
The fear of the blood feud is the great restraint upon disorder in 
primitive society, and conversely he whose death will excite no 
blood feud has no legal protection. 

So far the negative side of clan justice. The positive side has 
peculiarities not less startling to the modern mind, for since it is 
a member of one body who has done a wrong to a member of an- 
other body, the whole body to which the offending member be- 
longs is held responsible by the whole body to which the injured 
member belongs ; and it is not merely the original criminal who 
may be punished, but logically any member of his family may 
serve as a substitute. Responsibility is collective, and therefore 
also vicarious. Sometimes the whole family of the ofifender is 
destroyed with him. Sometimes any relation of the offender may 
suffer for him vicariously. John, who has done the deed, being 
out of reach, primitive vengeance is quite satisfied with the life of 
Thomas, his son, or brother, or cousin. Just as in the blind 
ness of warfare the treacherous act of an enemy is generalized 



LAW AND JUSTICE 351 

and perhaps avenged in the next battle by a retaliation which 
does not stay to ask whether it is falling on the innocent or the 
guilty, so in the primitive blood feud. The wrong done is the 
act of the family or clan to which the aggressor belongs, and may 
be avenged on any member of that family or clan. Sometimes 
the retaliation is made more specific by a fresh application of the 
Lex Talionis, and to the rule "eye for eye," there is the pendant 
"son for son, daughter for daughter, slave for slave, ox for ox." 
You have slain my son ? Then the true and just retribution is 
that I should slay yours. It is my daughter who is slain ? Then 
it is with your daughter that you must pay for her. Sometimes 
vengeance is specially directed against the chief as representing 
the clan. Sometimes it may be visited on any male, or even on 
any adult member of the clan, children alone being excluded. 
Sometimes this last shred of humanity is torn away. The prin- 
ciple is pushed to its furthest and most revolting development 
among the head-hunting tribes common in southeast Asia, in 
which magical ideas combine with those of revenge, and the skull 
of the enemy has a potency of its own which makes its possession 
desirable in itself. The head of a child or woman of the hostile 
body is no less coveted an object than that of the fighting warrior, 
and is probably easier to obtain. When the principle of compo- 
sition arises collective responsibility is reduced, by a less barba- 
rous logic, to a common pecuniary liability. The clan are col- 
lectively responsible for the blood money due from a member, and 
by the same logic they are the collective recipients of blood money 
due to any member. And as with blood money so with other 
debts. There is a collective liability — a conception which in 
this softened form has its uses in the social order, and is 
in fact enforced and applied to the commune — though in 
right it belongs rather to the clan — by many Oriental 
governments. 

6. Further, with the theory of collective responsibility goes al- 
most necessarily the failure to distinguish between accident and 
design. In primitive society the real gravamen of a charge 
against an aggressor is that he has done an injury. How he did 



352 



LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 



the injury, whether of set purpose or by accident, is a matter of 
less moment. My son, or brother, or cousin, or clansman, is 
killed ; that is enough for me ; I must have some satisfaction out 
of the man who did it, and, what is more, my family must have 
some satisfaction out of his family. Futhermore, the whole dis- 
tinction between design and accident is by no means so clear to 
primitive man as it is to us, for though it needs little reflection 
and a very moderate amount of self-knowledge to distinguish 
between what one has done one's self by accident or by design, 
and a very moderate degree of reasoning power to apply the dis- 
tinction to other men — still, the nascent reflection of the savage 
is strangled at birth by the prevailing theory of witchcraft and 
possession. If a tree falls upon a man's head the savage holds 
that a spirit guided it. If a man, cutting a branch from a tree, 
dropped his ax on to another's head, it may not have been the 
man's own soul which guided the ax, but it was another soul 
which possessed him temporarily; he was possessed by some 
spirit, and as possessed he should be put out of the way. The 
treatment of the subject in the Hebrew codes illustrates the dif- 
ficulty which is experienced even at a higher stage in strictly 
distinguishing between the two spheres of design and accident. 
Each code assigns a city of refuge for the excusable homicide, 
but none make it perfectly clear whether it is unintentional or 
unpremeditated man-sla)dng that is in view. The Book of the 
Covenant simply says, "If a man lie not in wait, but God deliver 
him (the victim) into his hand, then I will appoint thee a place 
whither he shall flee. And if a man come presumptuously upon 
his neighbor to slay him with guile, thou shalt take him from 
mine altar that he may die."^ In Deuteronomy there is an at- 
tempt to define accident. The city of refuge is appointed for 
"whoso killeth his neighbor unawares and hated him not in 
times past." The first qualification would be true of uninten- 
tional, the second of unpremeditated homicide. Then follows 
a somewhat elaborate illustration of a case of pure accident.^ 
"As when a man goeth into the forest with his neighbor to hew 
1 Exodus xxi. 13, 14. ^ Deut. xix. 4-6. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 353 

wood, and his hand fetcheth a stroke with the ax to cut down the 
tree, and the head sUppeth from the helve, and Hghteth upon his 
neighbor, that he die, he shall flee unto one of these cities and 
live :" and then it is once more stated that the slayer ought not 
to die, "inasmuch as he hated him not in time past," which would 
be true of any want of premeditation. Furthermore, even in this 
relatively enlightened code the unintentional slayer is not fully 
protected. It is clearly anticipated that the "avenger of blood" 
will pursue him "while his heart is hot, and overtake him because 
the way is long," and smite him mortally, and there is no hint 
that the avenger will be punished. Nor was the alternative, 
exile to the city of refuge, a merely nominal penalty. Finally, 
in the Priestly Code there is an elaborate attempt to distinguish 
different cases. The cities of refuge are appointed for every one 
that "killeth any person unwittingly," or, as the margin renders 
it, " through error." (An attempt is made to render the meaning 
clearer by specifying the implements used, of iron, wood or stone.) 
On the other hand, he who has killed another, "lying in wait" or 
"in enmity," is to be put to death by the avenger of blood "when 
he meeteth him." In intermediate cases the congregation shall 
judge. "But if he thrust him suddenly without enmity, or 
hurled upon him anything without lying in wait, or with any 
stone, whereby a man may die, seeing him not, and cast it upon 
him, so that he died, and he was not his enemy, neither sought 
his harm : then the congregation shall judge between the smiter 
and the avenger of blood according to these judgments." ^ Even 
here, then, the three cases of accident ("seeing him not"), as- 
sault without intent to kill ("thrust him suddenly"), and unpre- 
meditated homicide ("without lying in wait") seem to be in a 
measure confused. And even in this code the avenger may slay 
the man-slayer anywhere outside the borders of the city of refuge 
until the death of the high priest. 

Not infrequently in early law we find the distinction that un- 
intentional homicide is atonable by pajdng the wergild, while 
deliberate murder gives rise to the blood feud. Thus in the code 
^ Numbers xxxv. 15, 20, 21, 22-24. 



354 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOB HOUSE 

of Hammurabi the homicide might swear that the blow was un- 
intentional and escape with a fine. So, again, though Germanic 
law begins by holding a man equally imputable for all that he has 
done, it is an ancient mitigation that for unintentional homicide 
the wer is due, and the blood feud should not be waged. The 
disentanglement of innocent from culpable homicide was a very 
gradual achievement in medieval Europe though aided by the 
Civil and Canon Law, and the forfeiture of goods — the direct 
survival of the wergild — remained in theory in English law 
down to 1828. 

It is a natural, though, to our minds, a bizarre consequence 
that in early justice animals and even inanimate objects may be 
regarded as appropriate subjects of punishment. The slaying 
of offending animals is provided for in the Book of Exodus, Many 
cruel punishments were inflicted upon animals in the code of the 
Zendavesta,^ and the same thing occurred in medieval Europe, 
where, perhaps under the influence of the Mosaic legislation, it 
even survived in isolated cases to the sixteenth or seventeenth cen- 
tury. The punishment of animals and inanimate objects was no 
mere wreaking of blind fury on innocent creatures. Probably to 
the primitive mind the ox that gored a man, the sword that slew, 
and the murderer that wielded it, were much more on one level 
than they can be to us. The animal or tool, if not conscious them- 
selves, might be endued with a magic power or possessed with an 
evil spirit. It was well to get rid of them before they did more 
harm. If not destroyed they might be purified. Thus in the 
English law of Deodand, which was not abolished till the middle 
of the last century, there is a survival of the view that anything 
that has killed a man must undergo a kind of religious purifica- 
tion ; a cart, for instance, which ran over a man, or a tree which 
fell on him, was confiscated and sold for charity — at bottom 
merely a somewhat humanized version of the ancient Athenian 
process whereby the ax that had slain a man was brought to 
trial, and, if found guilty, solemnly thrown over the boundary. 
It need hardly be added that where responsibility is extended to 
^ The sacred writings of the Zoroastrian religion. — Editors. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 355 

animals and inanimate objects, it is apt to be inadequately 
defined in the case of idiots, lunatics, and minors. 

The principle of collective responsibility does not necessarily 
disappear with the rise of public justice under central authority. 
It lingers on, partly through sheer conservatism, but also in many 
cases for political reasons, to a late date. Thus it is particularly 
common to find that in political offenses the family of the offender 
suffers with him. The principle of collective responsibiUty has 
always been maintained in the Far East, in China, in the Korea, 
and, under the influence of Chinese civilization, in Japan, while 
it is noteworthy that for political offenses the parents and chil- 
dren might be punished under French law right down to the time 
of the Revolution. Parallels could be found in the laws of the 
ancient East, of ancient Persia, and of many states of medieval 
Europe. It is, in fact, only the decay of the joint family system 
and the rise of the free individual as the basis of the modern 
state which definitely does away with this principle, so funda- 
mentally irreconcilable with the strictly ethical notion of justice. 
An interesting transitional phase is to be found in the Old Testa- 
ment, where the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the chil- 
dren is very definitely laid down as a piece of Divine justice in 
the earlier legislation (I mean in the Second Commandment), 
whereas in the time of Ezekiel it was strongly maintained to be 
an injustice that when the fathers had eaten sour grapes the chil- 
dren's teeth should be set on edge. It was, in fact, part of the 
ethical revolution introduced by the later prophets to estabUsh 
morally for the Jewish code the principle of individual responsi- 
bility.i 

7. With the evolution of social order, and in particular with 
the growth of central authority, the redress of wrongs begins to 
take the form of an independent and impartial administration of 
justice. Let us trace this growth in outline from its beginnings. 

' Ezek. xviii. 2 ; Jer. xxxi. 29. The result is embodied in Deut. xxiv. 16. 
"The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the 
children be put to death for the fathers ; every man shall be put to death for 
his own sin." 



356 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOB HOUSE 

The blood feud proper is revenge guided and limited by cus- 
tom. It is not justice. It is waged by two conflicting parties, 
and there is no impartial third party to judge between them. 
But even in barbaric society the blood feud does not rage wholly 
without check. , The public opinion of the group is always a force 
to be reckoned with. Every man's rights and obligations are 
fixed by custom. The very vengeance taken on those who in- 
fringe them is a custom, and directed in all its details by tradi- 
tion. The headman or the elders of the clan or village are pre- 
pared to listen to complaints, to decide whether a wrong has 
been done, and, if so, what the reparation ought to be. The in- 
jured party may appeal to them if he pleases, and it may be that 
the aggressor will abide by their decision. If so, the affair is 
arranged perhaps by composition, perhaps by a stated penalty. 
Otherwise the parties will fight it out or it will come to a feud. 
In short, there is an effort on the part of the leading men to keep 
the peace and adjust the quarrel. Sometimes they will inter- 
vene of themselves if a feud becomes serious and threatens the 
general peace. 

The "court," if so it may be called, appears at this stage rather 
as peacemaker than judge. The disputants may ignore it, pre- 
ferring to trust to their own strength and that of their friends. 
Yet it is from the first the avenger's interest to have public 
opinion with him. He relies on the countenance and practical 
help of his kindred and fellow-tribesmen. At least he must avert 
their opposition. If the facts are peculiarly flagrant the neighbors 
will be with him and he will have the less difficulty in executing 
vengeance. Perhaps even the kindred of the wrongdoer will 
refuse to stand by him. Thus it becomes the interest of the 
avenger to make his case plain to the neighbors, and they in 
turn wish to hear what the accused party has to say. A palaver 
is held. The avenger comes with his kinsmen and friends. They 
state their case and announce their intention of seeking revenge. 
The accused is also present, backed by his kin, and repels the 
demands made on him. It may be that the matter is settled 
between the groups concerned. It may be that the neighbors 



LAW AND JUSTICE 357 

or the chief give sentence, but even so it does not follow that 
they enforce it. They may give the appellant their moral sup- 
port, and leave it to him to obtain satisfaction as best he can. 
But of course their decision helps him to get the opinion of the 
tribe on his side, and their moral force will be translatable into 
physical force. It will mean so many more backers for him, and 
so many less for his opponents. This support may be disdained 
by the strong, but it will be valued by the weak, and will be up- 
held by those who desire internal peace. Thus even under the 
clan and tribal organization of society some form of pubhc in- 
tervention may arise alongside of private redress. Feuds are 
averted by the adjustment of disputes, or, if a wrong has been 
done, by getting the complainant to accept composition, and 
the aggressor to undergo some penalty which will be a mitigated 
form of revenge, or by bringing the two parties to fight it out 
under the regular forms of a duel. 

Such methods of mitigating the blood feud are stimulated by 
the growth of the kingly power — that is to say, of an organized 
force outside the contending families or clans, which can sum- 
mon them before its bar, decide their cause, and require them to 
keep the peace. The king, whose duty and interest it is to main- 
tain public order, treats crime — or certain kinds of crime — no 
longer as an offense against the individual whom it primarily 
affects, but as a menace to public tranquiUity, a breach of his 
"peace." This, if he is strong enough, he will punish directly; 
if not sufficiently strong, he will deprive the offender of his pro- 
tection, put him outside the king's peace, and compel him by fine 
to buy back what he has lost. Thus we find crime punishable 
by wite as well as by bot — a fine to the king side by side with 
compensation to the kinsfolk. 

But from moral assistance the transition to physical assistance 
is not very difficult in idea, however slow and cumbrous it may 
have been in practice. There is more than one method of transi- 
tion. Sometimes we find the public authority, the elders or the 
whole body of the neighbors, or later the regular magistrate, 
exerting themselves to arrest the offender and handing him over 



358 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOB HOUSE 

to the avenger of blood for execution, or judging between 
the avenger .of blood and the man-slayer, whose act was 
" unwitting. " Thus in Deuteronomy, if the dehberate murderer 
flies to a city of refuge, " then the elders of his city shall send and 
fetch him thence, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of 
blood that he may die." ^ But without taking an active part 
in the pursuit and capture of the offender the court had an effec- 
tive weapon in the power of outlawry. Since in accordance with 
early ideas all personal rights depend upon membership of a 
society united for mutual protection, it follows that the man ex- 
cluded from the group is in the position of a stranger and an 
enemy ; he is a wolf's head, a wild animal whom the first comer 
may put to death at sight, with whom nobody may associate, to 
whom nobody may give food or lodging. Outlawry can therefore 
be applied either as a punishment or as a process — as a method of 
bringing the accused into court. What more reasonable than that 
if he will not submit to law he shall lose the protection of the law ? 
With this weapon, potent in proportion as the social order is de- 
veloped, the court of early law consolidates its authority, and 
from being a casual institution of voluntary resort for those who 
wish the sympathy of their neighbors in avenging their wrongs, 
becomes an established authority with compulsory powers before 
which either party can be summoned to appear at the instance of 
his opponent. 

8. But we are still a long way from a modern Court of Justice. 
The primary function of a court thus established is not so much 
to discover the merits of the case and make an equitable award, as 
to keep the peace and prevent the extension of wild and irregular 
blood feuds. What the court has to deal with is the fact that a 
feud exists. A comes before it with a complaint against B of 
having killed his kinsman, or stolen his cattle, or carried off his 
daughter. Here is a feud which, in the absence of a court, A 
will prosecute with his own right arm and that of his kinsmen if 
he can get them to help him. B, again, will resist with the help 
of his kinsmen, and so there will be a vendetta The court, 
1 Deut. xix. 12. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 359 

whose primary object is to secure a settlement, does not go into 
nice questions as to the precise merits and demerits of A and B, 
but it can prescribe certain tests whereby the appellant or the 
defendant may establish his case. It sets the litigant "a task 
that he must attempt. If he performs it, he has won his cause." 
The performance of this task is not, to our minds, proof of the 
justice of his cause. It is rather the compliance with a legal and 
orderly method of establishing a case, but at the stage we are 
considering it was probably regarded as satisfying justice, at 
least, as far as justice claimed to be satisfied. 

What task, then, would the court award ? It might be that 
the litigant should maintain his cause with his body. The par- 
ties would then have to fight it out in person or by their cham- 
pions. Here we have the method of the blood feud, but regu- 
larized, limited, and transformed into the judicial duel. Again, 
the court might put one or both parties to the oath. But this is 
not the oath of the modern law court — that is to say, it is not 
a solemn asseveration of the truth of certain evidence of fact, 
but an assertion of the general justice of the claim alleged, or of 
its injustice, as the case may be. And as the feud will not be 
waged by the individual claimant alone, but with the aid of all 
his kindred, so the court will expect the kindred to come and take 
the oath along with him. Hence the institution of oath-helpers, 
the compurgators, who are in point of fact the fellow-clansmen all 
bound to the duty at this stage of swearing their friend out of the 
difficulty, just as before they were bound to help him out of it by 
arms. The compurgators are simply clansmen fighting with 
spiritual weapons instead of carnal ones. Success in the cause 
will depend not on the opinion formed by the court as to the 
veracity of one side or the perjury of the other, but on the ability 
of the parties to get the full number of compurgators required, on 
formal correctness in taking the oath, and if both parties fulfill 
all conditions and no further means are available for deciding 
between them, on certain rules as to the burden of proof. 

The pro\dsion of such further means of deciding between the 
parties is logically the next step. So far, the judicial process has 



360 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 



appeared merely as a regularization of the blood feud, but both 
the oath and the judicial combat point the way to a higher ideal 
The court itself is not in a position to try the merits of the case 
unless it be some very simple matter of the criminal caught red- 
handed, but it may refer the decision to the unseen powers, 
to the gods, or to the magical qualities inherent in certain things. 
Thus the judicial duel, instead of being a mere carnal fight regu- 
larized and limited by certain rules, may be conceived rather as 
an appeal to the judgment of God, and the victory as His sen- 
tence which the court hesitates to pronounce on the basis of its 
merely human wisdom. Similarly the oath — though less than 
evidence as we conceive evidence — is also more, for it is an 
appeal to powers in which primitive man implicitly believes, to 
take vengeance on him who swears, if his cause be not just. 
Hence the form of the oath is everything, for the unknown 
powers are great sticklers for form. The oath-taker calls down 
their punishment on himself and his family by a set formula 
which they will rigidly obey. If in the formula he can leave 
himself any loophole of escape the oath is void; it is no true 
summoning of the vengeful powers, and the court will disregard 
it, but if it is complete and sound in point of form, then there is no 
escape. One of two things must happen : either the oath was true 
or the curse will fall, and thus perjury brings its own punishment. 

Hence it is that for any given charge the law may call upon a 
man to purge himself by oath, or perhaps to purge himself along 
with a specified number of oath-helpers who will suffer with him 
if the oath is false, and the oath-helpers required may be increased 
according to the seriousness of the crime. If the oath fails, the 
prescribed punishment follows. If it is duly taken, then either 
the accused was innocent, or he has inflicted the punishment 
entailed by the broken oath on himself and his oath-helpers. 

But the consequences of a false oath were not immediately 
apparent. If the court wished to have the judgment of the 
Unseen Powers before it some more summary process was neces- 
sary. This was found in the ordeal, a test to which both parties 
could be submitted if necessary, and of which the results were 



1 



LAW AND JUSTICE 361 

immediate and manifest. Probably no institution is more uni- 
versal at a certain stage of civilization than that of testing the 
truth or falsity of a case by a certain magico-religious process — 
the eating of a piece of bread, the handling of burning iron, or 
boiling oil, jumping into water, walking through fire, exposure to 
wild beasts, and so forth. The details vary, though even in 
detail resemblances crop up at the most remote periods and in the 
most remote places, but the general principle is still more clearly 
constant through the ages and the climes. Truth cannot at this 
stage be tested by human evidence. At most, the criminal caught 
red-handed may be summarily dispatched upon the evidence of 
eye-witnesses given there and then, but the complicated civil 
or criminal processes of the civilized world imply an intellectual 
as well as a moral development which makes them impossible 
at an early stage. It is the gods who judge ; the man who can 
handle hot iron is proved by heaven to be innocent ; the woman 
whom the holy river rejects is a \vitch ; he whom the bread 
chokes is a perjurer. Nor are these tests wholly devoid of ra- 
tional basis ; it is not so difficult to understand that the guilty 
man would be more liable to choke than the innocent, not be- 
cause bread is holy, but because his nerves are shaken. It is 
quite intelligible that in a credulous age the false oath would 
bring its curse in the form of a will paralyzed by terror, just as we 
know that amongst many savages witchcraft really kills through 
the sufferer's intense fear of it. Lastly, if the criminal may be 
ready to take his chances of the curse in preference to the cer- 
tainties of the scaffold, he may find it difficult to get compurga- 
tors to stand by him, and in the face of their plain knowledge in- 
volve themselves in the same risk. 

9. Thus, particularly in the institution of compurgation, we 
find the beginnings of a new conception, the conception that it is 
the duty of the court to try the case, to obtain proof of facts, 
to give its own verdict based on its own judgment, and execute 
its own sentence by its own officers. The steps by which this 
change is achieved belong rather to the history of jurisprudence 
than to that of comparative ethics. Only certain broad fea- 



362 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

tures of the new phase concern us. Its primary condition is per- 
haps not so much a new growth of moral ideas as the formation of 
an effective organ of government. The elders or the petty chief 
of the village community hesitate to carry out a death sentence 
or inflict corporal punishment for fear of involving themselves 
in the blood feud. There must be an executive power with suffi- 
cient force behind it to raise its officers above the fear of revenge 
before a public system of justice, in the full sense, can arise. 
Hence the decay of blood revenge and the rise of public justice 
are frequently associated with the growth of kingly power. 
For example, in Europe in the early Middle Ages we have seen 
that certain offenses were treated as breaches of the king's peace. 
This peace was a protection afforded in the first instance to cer- 
tain places and times, but it was gradually extended, largely it 
would seem through the king's protection of the roads — "the 
king's highway" — to all places and all times. Thus the act 
which had been a breach of the king's peace, punished by the with- 
drawal of his protection only when committed at certain times 
and places, now became an offense against him at all times and 
places. Its punishment was still outlawry. But as outlawry 
deprived a man of all rights, it enabled the king to inflict what 
penalty he chose. The criminal, in fact, was at his mercy ; any 
penalty short of death with forfeiture of all goods would be an 
indulgence, and hence the royal courts could fix a scale of 
punishments at their pleasure. 

With the growth of public justice the function of the courts 
is changed : they have no longer to supervise the feuds of hostile 
families, but to maintain public order, to detect and punish 
crime, and to uphold innocent people in their rights. This 
involves numerous changes. In the first place, self-help, the 
obtaining of satisfaction by the strong hand, is no longer neces- 
sary. The injured man can get a remedy from the court, and 
vengeance is forbidden. The victory is not immediate, and often 
the state has to come to some compromise with the old system. 
For example, vengeance may be allowed in flagrante delicto,^ or 
1 At the moment of the crime. — Editors. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 363 

within a certain period after the offense. Where state justice is 
very weak, an asylum may be granted within which revenge must 
not be executed ; in other cases where the process is further ad- 
vanced and justice is getting the upper hand, revenge is allowed 
only with the consent of a court. Or lastly, excluded from all 
ordinary cases, revenge is tolerated as a concession to human 
weakness in cases where strong passions are excited — for example, 
in breaches of the marriage law to this day in many civilized coun- 
tries. The transition was the harder because it involved a funda- 
mental ethical change. From its beginning, as we have seen, 
social order rested on the readiness of every man to stand by his 
kinsmen in their quarrels. Hence the duty of avenging the 
injured kinsman, and therefore of loving one's neighbor in this 
sense and hating one's enemy, was the most sacred of primitive 
principles, bound up with everything that made a common life 
possible. Public justice bade men lay aside this principle, ard 
its triumph constitutes one of the greatest of social revolutions. 

But if the kindred be no longer allowed to avenge themselves, 
the corresponding right of the offender to make peace with the 
kin is also withdrawn. A crime is now a public affair, and in vary- 
ing degrees according to time and country the public authority 
takes upon itself the function of maintaining order and of dis- 
covering as well as punishing offenders. The trial ceases to be 
a milder form of the blood feud. The complainant no longer 
exposes himself to equal punishment by way of retaliation in case 
he loses his suit. What was previously accusation now becomes 
denunciation. Again, though the injured party may set the 
whole process in motion, the result will differ vitally according 
to the nature of the act of which he complains. Justice, having 
public interests in view, will count not only the magnitude of the 
injury suffered, but the degree of culpability in the man who 
inflicted it. Vengeance, the object of the older process, breaks 
up into the two distinct ideas of punishment inflicted by the judge, 
and restitution assigned to the complainant. Civil and criminal 
justice are distinct. 

10. Once become serious in its determination to investigate 



364 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

the case before giving sentence, public justice could not long be 
satisfied with the older supernatural machinery. In medieval 
Europe it was early a matter of remark that the battle was not 
always to the just. "We are," says the Lombard king, Luit- 
prand, "uncertain about the judgment of God, and have heard 
that many through the battle lose their cause without justice; 
but the law itself, on account of the custom of our race of Lom- 
bards, we cannot forbid." 

It was therefore a great step in advance when ordeals, which 
had been adopted by the church after the barbarian invasions, 
were condemned by the Lateran Council of 1 215. As a conse- 
quence they disappear in England after the reign of John, while 
the oath of compurgators is gradually converted into evidence to 
character. The ordeal by battle remained, but an alternative 
was offered in the form of a judicial inquiry with witnesses and 
evidence. The accused might, in English phrase, "put himself 
upon his country," i.e., let his case go before a jury, men of his 
neighborhood knowing the facts and prepared to testify to them, 
or in French phrase the accused could be offered the "enqueste 
du pais." ^ And this alternative, if at first optional, soon mani- 
fested its vast superiority, and the settlement of all disputes and 
all accusations by an impartial tribunal, which has heard what 
both sides have to say, becomes an integral part of the civilized 
order. But even-handed justice is not reached at one stride. 
The public authorities having once taken up the function of re- 
pressing crime are more bent on efiiciency in the maintenance 
of order than on nice considerations of justice to individuals. 
Their tendency is to treat the accused man as guilty, and means 
of proving his innocence are somewhat grudgingly meted out to 
him as privileges rather than as rights, while deficiencies of evi- 
dence are boldly supplemented by the use of torture. In Eng- 
lish law, indeed, torture (except in the case of the peine forte et 
dure) 2 never seems to have been fully recognized ; if used by the 
absolute monarchy it was as a political instrument rather than 

' State inquir3^ — Editors. 

2 Torture applied to a prisoner to compel him to plead. — Editors. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 365 

as part of the ordinary machinery of law. On the Continent, on 
the other hand, owing partly perhaps to a stricter theory of the 
amount of evidence necessary for proof, partly to the fact that 
the authorities were more determined to suppress crime than to 
protect individuals from the possibility of undeserved suffering, 
torture became a recognized method of supplementing defective 
evidence. The judicial conscience was easier if it extorted a con- 
fession from a man before condemning him than if it acted solely 
on evidence undistorted by physical suffering. Even where tor- 
ture was not allowed the accused was not always put on a level 
with the prosecution as to the right of giving evidence, calling 
witnesses and employing counsel. It is not until all these condi- 
tions are fulfilled that a court of justice can be said to come up 
to the ideal of a place in which the full merits of the case are 
investigated before a verdict is given. Even now it must be 
remarked that an English trial preserves much of the form of the 
old judicial combat. Its method of obtaining a verdict is still 
that of pitting attack and defense against one another. It may 
be that this is the best method of obtaining truth where human 
interests and passions are at stake, and that the advocate must 
always retain a place beside the judge : but what seems clear is 
that the power of the purse in retaining the best legal skill is a 
make-weight, especially in civil cases, of no slight practical 
importance ; and it is possible that our descendants will look 
back upon a system which allowed wealth to count for so much 
before what should be an absolutely impartial tribunal, as not 
differing so much as we should like to think from the old ordeal 
by battle. The fight with the purse is not the ideal substitute 
for the fight with the person. 

II. We have seen that public justice often led to severity in 
the process of obtaining truth ; still more was this the case in the 
punishment of crime. Accompanying the growth of order in a 
barbarian society there is, as has been remarked above, a tend- 
ency to substitute a system of composition for blood vengeance 
by a money payment. This system made for social peace, but, 
particularly with the increase of wealth and difference of rank, it 



366 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

lent itself to frightful abuses. Crimes, punished perhaps too 
fiercely in early society, became for the well-to-do too lightly and 
easily atonable, and it is not surprising that at the next stage of 
social development, in which the central power has consolidated 
itself and the executive has become strong enough to dismiss any 
fear of the blood feud, a period of severer punishment should 
set in. Crime now becomes a revolt against authority, a chal- 
lenge to the powers that be, civil and perhaps ecclesiastical as 
well, to put forth all their strength to subdue it. Moreover, the 
central authority at its best acts in the interests of public order, 
and on the whole represents the principle of impartial judgment 
as between disputants, and of progress towards internal peace 
and the reign of law. On the other hand, order is still difficult 
to maintain and powerful families are recalcitrant. From such 
causes as these acting in combination the criminal law now 
reaches the acme of its rigor. Death penalties or savage mutila- 
tions are inflicted for offenses of the second and third order, tor- 
ture is freely used to extort confession, and the brutality of the 
mob is called in to supplement that of the executioner. 

As to the severity, or rather barbarity, of the criminal law in 
Europe down to the nineteenth century little need be said, as the 
broad facts are well known. In England death was theoretically 
the penalty for all felonies except petty larceny and mayhem, 
from the Middle Ages down to 1826. This rule was subject to 
the exceptions based on "benefit of clergy," which originally 
meant the right of a clerk to be tried in the ecclesiastical courts ; 
then, being extended to all who could read, became something of 
the nature of a class privilege, and finally in 1705, the necessity 
for reading being abolished, was converted into a means of grace. 
The punishment for a "clergyable" offense was to be branded in 
the hand and imprisoned for not more than one year, except in 
the case of larceny, which by the law of 171 7 was punishable by 
transportation for seven years. From the fifteenth century 
onwards a succession of statutes excluded more and more offenses 
from benefit of clergy, and thus at the end of the seventeenth 
century suc^ offenses as arson, burglary, horse stealing, stealing 



LAW AND JUSTICE 367 

from the person above the value of a shilling, rape and abduction 
with intent to marry, were all capital "whether the offender 
could read or not." In the eighteenth century the list was 
lengthened, but transportation was often substituted for the 
death penalty. Women were still burnt alive for the murder 
of a husband or master, or for coining. Both men and women 
were whipped, the men publicly through the streets, the women 
as a rule privately, for petty thefts. The pillory was still in use 
for perjury and other offenses. Meanwhile the state of the 
prisons, where innocent and guilty, debtors (often with their 
families) and convicted criminals were all huddled together with- 
out discrimination, was, when Howard began his work, a scandal 
of the first magnitude. Gaol fever raged, prisons were still 
private property, and the prisoner, innocent or guilty, had to 
fee his gaoler and pay for every comfort and even for necessaries. 
In the Bishop of Ely's prison the gaoler prevented escapes by 
chaining his prisoners on their backs on the floor, and fastening 
a spiked iron collar about their necks. "Even when recon- 
structed it had no free ward, no infirmary and no straw ; and 
debtors and felons were confined together." 

12. But even before Howard's time a new order of ideas was 
slowly emerging. As society becomes more confident in its 
power to maintain order, the cruelty and callousness that are 
born of fear are seen in a new light. More humane influences 
make themselves felt, and from that moment excessive severity 
begins to militate against the proper execution of the law, es- 
pecially under a jury system like ours. With the advance of 
civil and religious liberty, political or ecclesiastical offenses grow 
rare, and a breach of the law becomes more and more synony- 
mous with a grave moral offense against society. The whole prob- 
lem of criminal justice is thus transferred to the ethical plane, but 
the change raises problems which a century has been too short a 
time to solve. The general right to punish may be derived from 
the right of society to protect itself. This principle taken by itself ^ 

' So taken it is a one-sided account. Punishment, like other actions, can 
only be justified as doing the maximum of good and the minimum of evil 



368 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

might be held to justify the barbarities of the old law, had 
not experience shown that extreme severity was not in real- 
ity an effective instrument of discipline, while it undoubtedly 
tended to harden manners and accustom people to witness suffer- 
ing with indifference. Its dealings with the criminal mark, one 
may say, the zero point in the scale of treatment which society 
conceives to be the due of its various members. If we raise this 
point we raise the standard all along the scale. The pauper 
may justly expect something better than the criminal, the self- 
supporting poor man or woman than the pauper. Thus if it is 
the aim of good civilization to raise the general standard of life, 
this is a tendency which a savage criminal law will hinder and a 
humane one assist. Moreover, the old rigor, so far as it rested 
on reason at all, was based on a very crude psychology. People 
are not deterred from murder by the sight of the murderer dan- 
gling from a gibbet. On the contrary, what there is in them of lust 
for blood is tickled and excited, their sensuality or ferocity is 
aroused, and the counteracting impulses, the aversion to blood- 
shed, the compunction for suffering, are arrested. Fear, on 
which the principle of severity wholly relies, is a master motive 
only with the weak, and only while it is very present. As soon 
as there is a chance of escaping detection it evaporates, and, it 
would seem, the more completely in proportion as the very 
magnitude of the penalty makes it difficult for a man really to 
imagine himself as the central figure in so terrible a drama. 
Finally, the infliction of heavy penalties for secondary crimes 
may induce a reckless despair, and the saying about the sheep 
and the lamb was but too apt a comment on the working of the 
criminal law at the time. Thus the first step of reform was to 
abolish the ferocious penalties of the old law. In this direction a 
long list of well-known and honored names, Beccaria, Howard, 
Bentham, Romilly, Fowell Buxton, Elizabeth Fry, indicate 

admitted by the circumstances to all concerned. If any evil (suffering or 
loss of character) is inflicted on the criminal which is not absolutely necessi- 
tated by social security, or the ultimate welfare of the criminal himself, it is 
evil inflicted for its own sake, which is the essence of immorality. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 369 

roughly the intellectual and moral influences at work. The 
Society of Friends, French Rationalists, English Utilitarians and 
the Evangelicals played their part in this, as in so many of the 
changes that have made the modern world. The movement 
was under way by the second third of the eighteenth century. 
Beccaria's book was published in 1764 and had an immediate 
success, bearing early fruit in the abolition of torture on the 
Continent. Branding was abolished in England in 1779. Capital 
punishment had been abolished for a time in Russia in 1753, and 
the purchase of prisoners as galley slaves was forbidden by Maria 
Theresa in 1762. In England the peine forte et dure was abol- 
ished in 1772, and in 1770 a House of Commons committee even 
reported that there were some ofifenses for which the death pen- 
alty might with advantage be exchanged for some other punish- 
ment. These few indications show that the tide was beginning 
to turn. In France the movement was hastened by the Revolu- 
tion. The Declaration of Rights in 1789 laid down the control- 
ling principle of the modern theory that "the right to punish is 
limited by the law of necessity," and this was supplemented in 
1791 by the declaration of the Assembly that "penalties should 
be pj-oportioned to the crimes for which they are inflicted, and 
that they are intended not merely to punish, but to reform the 
culprit." In accordance with this principle the Assembly made 
imprisonment the chief method of punishment, and founded 
the penitentiary system of France. In England the great re- 
action produced by the Revolution retarded the reform of the 
criminal law, but throughout the time of the Revolutionary 
Wars, men like Romilly fought an uphill fight. He succeeded 
in suppressing the death penalty for pocket-picking in 1808, but 
his subsequent efforts to abolish capital punishment for stealing 
goods of the value of five shillings from shops were frustrated by 
the House of Lords. Little progress, in fact, was made till 1832, 
when horse and sheep stealing ceased to be capital, and from this 
time onwards the list of capital offenses was steadily reduced, 
till in 1 86 1 murder was for all practical purposes the only one that 
remained. 



370 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

Meanwhile, as substitutes for the old savagery, there grew up 
first the transportation and then the penitentiary system. Re- 
garded as a means of giving the offender a fresh start in life in 
new surroundings remote from his old bad associates and the 
memory of his crimes, transportation has much to recommend 
it, but it was clearly incompatible with colonial development. 
It was necessary to fall back on the prison system, and the ef- 
forts of reformers have been devoted to the task of making con- 
finement — a thing soul-destructive in itself — as nearly com- 
patible as may be with the regeneration of the prisoner. These 
efforts have hardly passed the experimental stage, yet certain re- 
sults have emerged. The necessity for a classification which 
prevents the first offender from being contaminated by the hard- 
ened jail-bird, the benefits of action and practical employment, 
the superiority of hope to fear as a stimulus to good conduct and 
the consequent advantages to be found in allowing the convict 
means of improving his position and even shortening his sen- 
tence by good behavior, are matters of general agreement. But 
it is clearly necessary to go further than this. The plan of im- 
prisoning a man for a longer or shorter term, and then without 
asking what effect his experience is likely to have had on him, 
turning him loose again upon society, a broken human being less 
capable than ever of earning an honest living, cannot stand. 
The old way of hanging at least rid society of the criminal. It 
stood condemned for its utter barbarity, which was indirectly as 
harmful to society as it was cruel to the sufferer. The modern 
method is still a terrible penalty, at least to the better sort of 
criminals, and far from relieving society of their presence, tends 
to harden and degrade them further. Hence judicious thinkers 
like Frederick Hill, in his report of 1839, soon recognized that a 
more thorough system was required. The offender must be re- 
formed, and at need he must even be detained until he was given 
good promise of reformation, and society must help him back 
into honest ways. The most thoroughgoing attempt in this 
direction is that of the Elmira system, followed now in several 
American states, in which, the sentence being wholly or within 



LAW AND JUSTICE 371 

limits indeterminate, the fate of the convict depends on his own 
exertions. He can raise himself from a lower to a higher grade 
by continued good behavior, and finally can obtain liberation on 
parole. 

13. Whatever the outcome of these experiments, the modern 
state stands committed to the humane method of criminal treat- 
ment, and could not revert to the old plan save at the risk of a gen- 
eral rebarbarization. That being so, it is necessary to push the 
new method through and to treat the criminal throughout as a 
" case " to be understood and cured. We touch here the scientific 
conception underlying the modern theory of punishment. Crime, 
like everything else that men do or suffer, is the outcome of 
definite conditions. These conditions may be psychological or 
physical, personal or social. They arise in the character of the 
agent as it has grown up in him from birth in interaction with the 
circumstances of his life. We may recognize them in social sur- 
roundings, in overcrowding or underfeeding, in the sense of 
despair produced by the denial of justice, or in the overweening 
insolence of social superiority. But whatever they may be, if 
we wish to prevent crime, we must discover the conditions operat- 
ing to produce crime and act upon them. This does not destroy, 
but defines personal responsibility. The last link in the chain of 
causation which produces any act is always the disposition of the 
agent at the time of action, and unless dominated by ungovernable 
impulse,^ this disposition is always modifiable by the introduc- 
tion of a fresh motive as a weight in the scale. But though not 
destroyed, responsibility is transformed by science, and with it 
the whole conception of punishment." When a wicked act was 

^ This makes no exception to the general statement that character is the 
cause of action, since that paralysis of the will which leaves a man the sport 
of impulse is itself a matter of character. As to control of man's conduct by 
heredity much nonsense is talked. Heredity is not a force controlling a man 
from without, but a short expression for the supposed antecedent causes of 
the quahties which make him what he is, and by what he is, he is to be judged, 
so far as he is judged at all. 

^ Responsibility, properly understood, is definable as the capacity to be 
determined by an adequate motive. A man is responsible who knows what 



372 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOB HOUSE 

held to be something arising in a spontaneous arbitrary manner 
from the unmotived evil choice of a man, the vindictive retribu- 
tion which is founded on instinct and fostered by the needs of 
early society seemed amply justified. When good and evil alike 
are seen to grow out of assignable antecedents by processes which 
calmly judging men can pretty closely foretell, to rest on laws 
of growth and disease which apply to character as other laws 
apply to the physical organism, to express the lack of imagina- 
tion or low power of reasoning which makes men hard, cruel, and 
unjust, or to flow from the over-excitement or insufficient satis- 
faction of physical impulses that makes them a prey to lust or 
alcohol, then every thinking man is made to feel in a new sense 
that but for the grace of conditions which he has only very par- 
tially and imperfectly controlled, there where the criminal 
passes to disgrace and misery goes he himself, the juryman, the 
judge, the newspaper reader who explodes in satisfaction over the 
swinging sentence. No one can fully face the problem of respon- 
sibility and become, however dimly, aware of the multitudinous 
roots from which character and conduct spring, without feeling 
the utter inadequacy of the retributive theory of punishment. 
Vindictiveness has its natural sphere in the stage at which crime 
is only known as an injury to be revenged. As soon as it be- 
comes a wrong act to be punished, the nature of wrong and the 
meaning of punishment have to be reconsidered. If the first 
principle of rational ethics is that action can only be justified by 
doing good to those whom it affects, this principle receives a 
striking confirmation from the one quarter in which its applica- 
tion might seem doubtful. For a natural impulse makes us 
desire to harm the wicked, but the history of criminal law and the 
philosophical analysis of responsibility combine to prove to us 
that this is the impulse of the Old Adam and not warranted by 

is expected of him, understands the consequences of his action, and is deter- 
mined therein by that iinowledge. Reward and punishment, praise and 
blame, are therefore justly awarded in so far as they afifect action. Beyond 
this, retribution is inapphcable, and praise and blame pass into admiration 
and pity. 



LAW AND JUSTICE 373 

reason or justice. Justice, in punishment as in other things, 
seeks the good of all whom it affects, of the criminal as of the in- 
jured party. Yet all true punishment inflicts pain, for precisely 
the truest punishment consists in the full realization of the char- 
acter of what one has done. This realization, with all the mental 
misery that it involves, we may justly wish to be the lot of every 
criminal, whether convicted or unconvicted, whether despised 
or, like the greatest offenders, honored by the world. So far 
pain is rightly attached to wrongdoing as, ethically speaking, 
its inevitable consequence. But any other sort of pain, any 
physical suffering that has no such healing moral effect, may grat- 
ify an animal thirst for vengeance but has no solace for our 
moral thirst for the triumph, even in the mind of the wrongdoer 
of the righteousness which he has set at naught. 

The modern state upholds its members in the enjoyment of 
their rights and gives them redress for injuries to themselves in 
the civil courts. It also intervenes on its own motion to main- 
tain public order by the punishment of lawbreakers. Religious ' 
and political offenses falling into the background, legal of- 
fenses tend to be restricted to criminal acts, and punishment to 
be proportioned to the imputed degree of moral guilt. ^ But this 
ethical view of punishment, when pushed home, compels the 
admission that the individual theory of responsibility is no more 
final than the old collective theory, and punishment is compelled 
to justify itself by its actual effect on society in maintaining 
order without legalizing brutality, on the criminal in deterring 
him or in aiding his reform, in both relations as doing good, not 
as doing harm. The criminal, too, has his rights — the right 

1 The converse proposition that wicked acts are all treated as legal 
offenses does not follow, nor is it true of the modern state. The questions 
as to the sphere of the state which arise here cannot be dealt with on this 
occasion. 

Offenses against the public order do not constitute an exception to the 
statement in the text. In themselves they are slight offenses, and the 
penalty is always light, but the deUberate defiance of the public order is of 
course an immoral act unless justified by some bad end which that order 
may be made to serve. 



374 LEONARD TRELAWNEY HOBHOUSE 

to be punished, but so punished that he may be helped in the path 
of reform. 

Briefly to resume the main phases in the evolution of public 
justice, we find that at the outset the community interferes 
mainly on what we may call supernatural grounds only with 
actions which are regarded as endangering its own existence. 
Otherwise justice, as we know it, in the sense of an impartial 
upholding of rights and an impartial punishment of wrongdoing, 
is unknown. In place of that we have at the outset purely 
private and personal retaliation. This develops into the sys- 
tematized blood feuds of consolidated families and clans. At 
this stage responsibility is collective, redress is collective, in- 
tention is ignored, and there is no question of assessing punish- 
ment according to the merit of the individual. When retalia- 
tion is mitigated by the introduction of money payments no 
change in ethical principle occurs. It is only as social order 
evolves an independent organ for the adjustment of disputes 
and the prevention of crime, that the ethical idea becomes sepa- 
rated out from the conflicting passions which are its earlier 
husk, and step by step the individual is separated from his family, 
his intentions are taken into account, his formal rectitude or 
want of rectitude is thrown into the background by the essential 
justice of the case, appeals to magical processes are abandoned, 
and the law sets before itself the aim of discovering the facts and 
maintaining right or punishing wrong accordingly. 

The rise of public justice proper necessitates the gradual aban- 
donment of the whole conception of the trial as a struggle be- 
tween two parties, and substitutes the idea of ascertaining the 
actual truth in order that justice may be done. That is at first 
carried out by supernatural means, viz. by the ordeal and the 
oath. These in turn give way to a true judicial inquiry by 
evidence and rational proof. The transition occurred in Eng- 
land mainly during the thirteenth century, the turning point 
being marked by the prohibition of the ordeal by Innocent III 
in 1215. The early stages of public justice administered by the 
recently developed central power led to excessive barbarity 



LAW AND JUSTICE 375 

in the discovery and punishment of crime. It took some more 
centuries to prove to the world that efficacy in these relations 
could be reconciled with humanity and a rational consideration 
of the best means of getting at truth. By so long and round- 
about a process is a result, so simple and obvious to our minds, 
attained. 



XIII 
THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 

Henry Sumner Maine 

[Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822-1888) was a prominent British 
statesman and student of politics. He held important lectureships in civil 
law and jurisprudence at Cambridge and Oxford and produced a number of 
works, notably his Ancient Law, pubhshed in 1861, which are regarded as 
among the first to utihze the new "historical method" in the study of po- 
litical and legal institutions. 

The Prospects of Popular Government, from the author's Popular Govern- 
ment, 1885, is by no means a wholly conclusive analysis of modern democ- 
racy. It can scarcely be questioned that the writer is moved by something 
dangerously like prejudice against pure democracy. But the essay is so 
accurate in its presentation of the points of debate, so concrete in illustra- 
tion, and most importantly, so wholly uninfluenced by the glamour of patri- 
otic enthusiasm over the generally assumed success of democratic govern- 
ment, that is possesses a stimulus to interest frequently lacking in more 
scientific or more impartial writings. Touching closely the question of the 
success of the democratic idea in England and America, Maine's work 
met with adverse criticism from some of the most prominent thinkers 
of the day. The ground upon which it was assailed was that although it ex- 
hibits much political and legal erudition, its attitude is deduced from the his- 
tory of democratic theory, corrected by casual observation of the results, 
rather than from the history of democracy itself. This weakness is discussed 
in a review by John Morley, reprinted in his Studies in Literature. A reply 
to Maine's argument directed primarily at his comments upon democratic 
rule in the United States is found in Lawrence Godkin's An American View 
of Popular Government, in the Nineteenth Century for February, 1886. God- 
kin's criticism was answered by Maine in the March number.] 

The blindness of the privileged classes in France to the Revo- 
lution which was about to overwhelm them furnishes some of 
the best-worn commonplaces of modern history. There was, no 
doubt, much in it to surprise us. What king, noble, and priest 

376 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 377 

could not see, had been easily visible to the foreign observer. 
"In short," runs the famous passage in Chesterfield's letter of 
December 25, 1753, "all the symptoms which I ever met with in 
history previous to great changes and revolutions in government 
now exist and daily increase in France." A large number of 
writers of our day, manifesting the wisdom which comes after 
the event, have pointed out that the signs of a terrible time ought 
not to have been mistaken. The court, the aristocracy, and 
the clergy should have understood that, in face of the irreligion 
which was daily becoming more fashionable, the belief in privi- 
lege conferred by birth could not be long maintained. They 
should have noted the portents of imminent political disturbance 
in the intense jealousy of classes. They should have been pre- 
pared for a tremendous social upheaval by the squalor and mis- 
ery of the peasants. They should have observed the immediate 
causes of revolution in the disorder of the finances and in the 
gross inequality of taxation. They should have been wise 
enough to know that the entire structure, of which the keystone 
was a stately and scandalous court, was undermined on all sides. 
"Beautiful Armida Palace, where the inmates live enchanted 
lives ; lapped in soft music of adulation ; waited on by the splen- 
dors of the world ; which nevertheless hangs wondrously as by a 
single hair." ^ 

But although Chesterfield appeals to history, the careful 
modern student of history will perhaps think the blindness of the 
French nobility and clergy eminently pardonable. The mon- 
archy, under whose broad shelter all privilege grew and seemed 
to thrive, appeared to have its roots deeper in the past than any 
existing European institution. The countries which now made 
up France had enjoyed no experience of popular government 
since the rude Gaulish freedom. From this, they had passed into 
the condition of a strictly administered, strongly governed, highly 
taxed, Roman province. The investigations of the young and 
learned school of historians rising in France leave it question- 
able whether the Germans, who are sometimes supposed to have 
^ Carlyle, French Revolution, vol. vi, p. 4. 



378 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

redeemed their own barbarism by reviving liberty, brought 
anything like freedom to Gaul. There was little more than a 
succession of German to Roman privileged classes. German cap- 
tains shared the great estates, and assumed the rank of the half- 
ofhcial, half-hereditary nobility, who abounded in the province. 
A German king, who was in reality only a Roman general bear- 
ing a barbarous title, reigned over much of Gaul and much of 
central Europe. When his race was supplanted by another in 
its kingship, the new power got itself decorated with the old 
Roman Imperial style ; and when at length a third dynasty arose, 
the monarchy associated with it gradually developed more vigor 
and vitality than any other political institution in Europe. 
From the accession of Hugh Capet to the French Revolution, 
there had been as nearly as possible 800 years. During all this 
time, the French royal house had steadily gained in power. 
It had wearied out and beaten back the victorious armies of 
England. It had emerged stronger than ever from the wars of 
religion which humbled English kingship in the dust, dealing it 
a blow from which it never thoroughly recovered. It had grown 
in strength, authority, and splendor, till it dazzled all eyes. It 
had become the model for all princes. Nor had its government 
and its relation to its subjects struck all men as they seem to have 
struck Chesterfield. Eleven years before Chesterfield wrote, 
David Hume, a careful observer of France, had thus written in 
1742: "Though all kinds of government be improved in modern 
times, yet monarchical government seems to have made the 
greatest advance to perfection. It may now be affirmed of 
civilized monarchies, what was formerly said of republics alone, 
that they are a government of laws, not of men. They are found 
susceptible of order, method, and constancy, to a surprising de- 
gree. Property is there secure ; industry is encouraged ; the arts 
flourish ; and the prince lives among his subjects like a father 
among his children." And Hume expressly adds that he saw 
more "sources of degeneracy" in free governments like England 
than in France, "the most perfect model of pure monarchy." ^ 
1 Hume. Essay .xii, "Of Civil Liberty." 



I 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 



379 



Nevertheless, Hume was unquestionably wrong in his con- 
clusion, and Chesterfield was as unquestionably right. The 
French privileged classes might conceivably have foreseen the 
great Revolution, simply because it happened. The time, how- 
ever, which is expended in wondering at their blindness, or in 
pitying it with an air of superior wisdom, is as nearly as possible 
wasted. Next to what a modern satirist has called " hypothet- 
ics" — the science of that which might have happened but did 
not — there is no more unprofitable study than the investigation 
of the possibly predictable, which was never predicted. It is of 
far higher advantage to note the mental condition of the French 
upper classes as one of the most remarkable facts in history, and 
to ask ourselves whether it conveys a caution to other generations 
than theirs. This line of speculation is at the least interesting. 
We too, who belong to western Europe towards the end of the 
nineteenth century, live under a set of institutions which all, ex- 
cept a small minority, regard as likely to be perpetual. Nine 
men out of ten, some hoping, some fearing, look upon the popu- 
lar government which, ever widening its basis, has spread and 
is still spreading over the world, as destined to last forever, or, 
if it changes its form, to change it in one single direction. The 
democratic principle has gone forth conquering and to conquer, 
and its gainsayers are few and feeble. Some Catholics, from 
whose minds the diplomacy of the present Pope has not banished 
the syllabus of the last, a fairly large body of French and Spanish 
Legitimists, and a few aged courtiers in the small circles sur- 
rounding exiled German and Italian princes, may still believe 
that the cloud of democratic ascendency will pass away. Their 
hopes may be as vain as their regrets ; but nevertheless those 
who recollect the surprises which the future had in store for men 
equally confident in the perpetuity of the present, will ask them- 
selves whether it is really true that the expectation of virtual 
permanence for governments of the modern type rests upon 
solid grounds of historical experience as regards the past, and of 
rational probability as regards the time to come. I endeavor 
in these pages to examine the question in a spirit different from 



380 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

that which animates most of those who view the advent of de- 
mocracy either with enthusiasm or with despair. 

Out of the many names commonly appHed to the political sys- 
tem prevailing or tending to prevail in all the civilized portions 
of the world, I have chosen "popular government " ^ as the name 
which, on the whole, is least open to objection. But what we 
are witnessing in west European politics is not so much the 
establishment of a definite system, as the continuance, at vary- 
ing rates, of a process. The truth is that, within two hundred 
years, the view taken of government, or (as the jurists say) of the 
relation of sovereign to subject, of political superior to political 
inferior, has been changing, sometimes partially and slowly, 
sometimes generally and rapidly. The character of this change 
has been described by John Stuart Mill, in the early pages of his 
Essay on Liberty, and more recently by Mr. Justice Stephen, 
who in his History of the Criminal Law of England very strik- 
ingly uses the contrast between the old and the new view of 
government to illustrate the difference between two views of the 
law of seditious libel. I will quote the latter passage as less 
colored than the language of Mill by the special preferences of 
the writer : 

" Two different views may be taken of the relation between 
rulers and their subjects. If the ruler is regarded as the 
superior of the subject, as being by the nature of his position 
presumably wise and good, the rightful ruler and guide of the 
whole population, it must necessarily follow that it is wrong to 
censure him openly, and, even if he is mistaken, his mistakes 
should be pointed out with the utmost respect, and that, 
whether mistaken or not, no censure should be cast on him 
likely or designed to diminish his authority. If, on the other 
hand, the ruler is regarded as the agent and servant, and the 
subject as the wise and good master, who is obliged to delegate 
his power to the so-called ruler because, being a multitude, he 

1 It will be seen that I endeavor to use the term "democracy," through- 
out this volume, in its proper and only consistent sense ; that is, for a par- 
ticular form of government. 



» 






THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 381 

cannot use it himself, it must be evident that this sentiment 
must be reversed. Every member of the pubHc who censures 
the ruler for the time being exercises in his own person the 
right which belongs to the whole of which he forms a part. He 
is finding fault with his own servant." ^ 

The states of Europe are now regulated by political institu- 
tions answering to the various stages of the transition from the 
old view, that "rulers are presumably wise and good, the rightful 
rulers and guides of the whole population," to the newer view, 
that "the ruler is the agent and servant, and the subject the wise 
and good master, who is obliged to delegate his power to the so- 
called ruler because, being a multitude, he cannot use it him- 
self." Russia and Turkey are the only European states which 
completely reject the theory that governments hold their powers 
by delegation from the community, the word "community" 
being somewhat vaguely understood, but tending more and more 
to mean at/ least the whole of the males of full age living within 
certain territorial limits. This theory, which is known on the 
Continent as the theory of national sovereignty, has been fully 
accepted in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, 
Greece, and the Scandinavian states. In Germany it has been 
repeatedly repudiated by the Emperor and his powerful minister, 
but it is to a very great extent acted upon. England, as is not 
unusual with her, stands by herself. There is no country in 
which the newer view of government is more thoroughly applied 
to practice, but almost all the language of the law and constitu- 
tion is still accommodated to the older ideas concerning the rela- 
tion of ruler and subject. 

But, although no such inference could be drawn from EngHsh 
legal phraseology, there is no doubt that the modern popular 
government of our day is of purely English origin. When it came 
into existence, there were republics in Europe, but they exercised 
no moral and little political influence. Although in point of 
fact they were most of them strict oligarchies, they were regarded 
as somewhat plebeian governments, over which monarchies took 
1 Stephen's History of the Criminal Law of England, vol. ii., p. 299. 



382 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

rightful precedence. "The republics in Europe," writes Hume 
in 1742, "are at present noted for want of politeness. The good 
manners of a Swiss civilized in Holland is an expression for rus- 
ticity among the French. The English in some degree fall under 
the same censure, notwithstanding their learning and genius. 
And if the Venetians be an exception, they owe it perhaps to their 
communication with other Italians." If a man then called him- 
self a republican, he was thinking of the Athenian or Roman 
republic, one for a while in a certain sense a democracy, the 
other from first to last an aristocracy, but both ruling a depend- 
ent empire with the utmost severity. In reality, the new prin- 
ciple of government was solely established in England, which 
Hume always classes with republics rather than with monar- 
chies. After tremendous civil struggles, the doctrine that gov- 
ernments serve the community was, in spirit if not in words, 
affirmed in 1689. But it was long before this doctrine was either 
fully carried out by the nation or fully accepted by its rulers. 
William III was merely a foreign politician and general, who sub- 
mitted to the eccentricities of his subjects for the sake of using 
their wealth and arms in foreign war. On this point the admis- 
sions of Macaulay are curiously in harmony with the view of 
William taken in the instructions of Louis XIV to his diploma- 
tists which have lately been published. Anne certainly believed 
in her own quasi-divine right ; and George I and George II were 
humbler kings of the same type as William, who thought that 
the proper and legitimate form of government was to be found, 
not in England, but in Hanover. As soon as England had in 
George HI a king who cared more for English politics than for 
foreign war, he repudiated the doctrine altogether; nor can it 
be said that it was really admitted by any English sovereign 
until, possibly, the present reign. But even when the horror of 
the French Revolution was at its highest, the politician, who 
would have been much in danger of prosecution if he had toasted 
the people as the "sole legitimate source of power," could always 
save himself by drinking to "the principles which placed the 
House of Hanover on the throne." These principles in the 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 383 

meantime were more and more becoming the actual rule of gov- 
ernment, and before George III died they had begun their vic- 
torious march over Europe. 

Popular government, as first known to the English, began to 
command the interest of the Continent through the admiration 
with which it inspired a certain set of French thinkers towards 
the middle of the last century. At the outset, it was not Eng- 
lish liberty which attracted them, but English toleration and 
also English irreligion, the last one of the most fugitive phases 
through which the mind of a portion of the nation passed, but 
one which so struck the foreign observer that, at the beginning 
of the present century, we find Napoleon Bonaparte claiming the 
assistance of the Pope as rightfully his because he was the enemy 
of the British misbeliever. Gradually the educated classes of 
France, at whose feet sat the educated class of all Continental 
countries, came to interest themselves in English political insti- 
tutions ; and then came two events, one of which greatly en- 
couraged, while the other in the end greatly discouraged, the 
tendency of popular government to diffuse itself. The first of 
them was the foundation of the United States. The American 
constitution is distinctively English ; this might be proved 
alone, as Mr. Freeman has acutely observed, by its taking two 
Houses, instead of one, or three, or more, as the normal structure 
of a legislative assembly. It is in fact the English constitution 
carefully adapted to a body of Englishmen who had never had 
much to do with an hereditary king and an aristocracy of birth, 
and who had determined to dispense with them altogether. The 
American republic has greatly influenced the favor into which 
popular government grew. It disproved the once universal 
assumptions, that no republic could govern a large territory, 
and that no strictly republican government could be stable. 
But at first the Republic became interesting for other reasons. 
It now became possible for Continental Europeans to admire 
popular government without submitting to the somewhat bitter 
necessity of admiring the English, who till lately had been the 
most unpopular of European nations. Frenchmen in particular, 



384 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

who had helped and perhaps enabled the Americans to obtain 
their independence, naturally admired institutions which were 
indirectly their own creation ; and Frenchmen who had not 
served in the American war saw the American freeman reflected 
in Franklin, who pleased the school of Voltaire because he be- 
lieved nothing, and the school of Rousseau because he wore a 
Quaker coat. The other event strongly influencing the fortunes 
of popular government was the French Revolution, which in the 
long run rendered it an object of horror. The French, in their 
new constitutions, followed first the English and then the 
American model, but in both cases with large departures from the 
originals. The result in both cases was miserable miscarriage. 
Political liberty took long to recover from the discredit into 
which it had been plunged by the Reign of Terror. In England, 
detestation of the Revolution did not cease to influence politics 
till 1830. But, abroad, there was a reaction to the older type of 
popular government in 18 14 and 181 5 ; and it was thought pos- 
sible to combine freedom and order by copying, with very slight 
changes, the British constitution. From a longing for liberty, 
combined with a loathing of the French experiments in it, there 
sprang the state of opinion in which the constitutional move- 
ments of the Continent had their birth. The British political 
model was followed by France, by Spain and Portugal, and by 
Holland and Belgium, combined in the kingdom of the Nether- 
lands ; and, after a long interval, by Germany, Italy, and Austria. 
The principle of modern popular government was thus affirmed 
less than two centuries ago, and the practical application of that 
principle outside these islands and their dependencies is not quite 
a century old. What has been the political history of the com- 
monwealths in which this principle has been carried out in vari- 
ous degrees ? The inquiry is obviously one of much importance 
and interest ; but, though the materials for it are easily obtained, 
and indeed are to a large extent within the memory of living men, 
it is very seldom or very imperfectly prosecuted. I undertake 
it solely with the view of ascertaining, within reasonable limits 
of space, how far actual experience countenances the common 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 385 

assumption of our day, that popular government is likely to be 
of indefinitely long duration. I will first take France, which 
began with the imitation of the English, and has ended with the 
adoption of the American model. Since the introduction of 
political freedom into France, the existing government, nomi- 
nally clothed with all the powers of the state, has been three times 
overturned by the mob of Paris, in 1792, in 1830, and in 1848. 
It has been three times overthrown by the Army; first in 1797, 
on the 4th of September (18 Fructidor), when the majority of the 
Directors with the help of the soldiery annulled the elections of 
forty-eight departments, and deported fifty-six members of the 
two Assemblies, condemning also to deportation two of their own 
colleagues. The second military revolution was effected by the 
elder Bonaparte on the 9th of November (18 Brumaire), 1799; 
and the third by the younger Bonaparte, on December 2, 185 1. 
The French government has also been three times destroyed by 
foreign invasion, in 1814, 1815, and 1870; the invasion having 
been in each case provoked by French aggression, sympathized 
in by the bulk of the French people. In all, putting aside the 
anomalous period from 1870 to 1885, France, since she began her 
polrtical experiments, has had forty-four years of liberty and 
thirty-seven of stern dictatorship.^ But it has to be remembered, 
and it is one of the curiosities of this period of history, that the 
elder Bourbons, who in practice gave very wide room to political 
freedom, did not expressly admit the modern theory of popular 
government ; while the Bonapartes, who proclaimed the theory 
without qualification, maintained in practice a rigid despotism. 
Popular government was introduced into Spain just when the 
fortune of war was declaring itself decisively in favor of Welling- 
ton and the EngHsh army. The Extraordinary Cortes signed 
at Cadiz a constitution, since then famous in Spanish pohtics 
as the constitution of 181 2, which proclaimed in its first article 
that sovereignty resided in the nation. Ferdinand VII, on 
re-entering Spain from France, repudiated this constitution, de- 

1 I include in the thirty-seven years the interval between September, 1797 
and November, 1799. 



386 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

nouncing it as Jacobinical ; and for about six years he reigned 
as absolutely as any of his forefathers. But in 1820 General 
Riego, who was in command of a large force stationed near Cadiz, 
headed a military insurrection in which the mob joined ; and the 
king submitted to the constitution of 181 2. In 1823 the for- 
eign invader appeared ; the French armies entered Spain at the 
instigation of the Holy Alliance, and reestablished Ferdinand's 
despotism, which lasted till his death. Popular government 
was, however, reintroduced by his widow as regent for his 
daughter, no doubt for the purpose of strengthening Isabella's 
title to the throne against her uncle, Don Carlos. It is probably 
unnecessary to give the subsequent political history of Spain in 
any detail. There are some places in South America where the 
people date events, not from the great earthquakes, but from the 
years in which, by a rare intermission, there is no earthquake at 
all. On the same principle we may note that during the nine 
years following 1845, ^^d the nine years following 1857, there 
was comparative, though not complete, freedom from military 
insurrection in Spain. As to the residue of her political history, 
my calculation is that between the first establishment of popular 
government in 1812 and the accession of the present king, there 
have been forty military risings of a serious nature, in most of 
which the mob took part. Nine of them were perfectly success- 
ful, either overthrowing the constitution for the time being, or 
reversing the principles on which it was administered. I need 
hardly say that both the queen regent, Christina, and her 
daughter Isabella, were driven out of Spain by the army or the 
fleet, with the help of the mob ; and that the present king, Al- 
fonso, was placed on the throne through a military pronuncia- 
niento at the end of 1874. It is generally thought that he owes 
his retention of it since 1875 to statesmanship of a novel kind. 
As soon as he has assured himself that the army is in earnest, he 
changes his ministers. 

The real beginning of popular or parliamentary government in 
Germany and the Austrian dominions, other than Hungary, can- 
not be placed earlier than 1848. The interest of German politics 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 387 

from 181 5 to that year consists in the complaints, ever growing 
fainter, of the German communities who sought to compel the 
princes to redeem their promises of constitutions made during 
the War of Independence, and of the efforts of the princes to es- 
cape or evade their pledges. Francis the Second expressed the 
prevailing feeling in his own way when he said to the Hungarian 
Diet, "totus mundus stultizat, et vult habere novas constitu- 
tiones." ^ With some exceptions in the smaller states there were 
no parliamentary institutions in Germany till the King of Prussia 
conceded, just before 1848, the singular form of constitutional 
government which did not survive that year. But as soon as the 
mob of Paris had torn up the French constitutional charter, 
and expelled the constitutional king, mobs, with their usual 
accompaniment, the army, began to influence German and even 
Austrian politics. National assemblies, on the French pattern, 
were called together at Berlin, at Vienna, and at Frankfort. All 
of them were dispersed in about a year, and directly or indirectly 
by the army. The more recent German and Austrian consti- 
tutions are all of royal origin. Taking Europe as a whole, the 
most durably successful experiments in popular government have 
been made either in small States, too weak for foreign war, such 
as Holland and Belgium,, or in countries like the Scandinavian 
states, where there was an old tradition of political freedom. 
The ancient Hungarian constitution has been too much afifected 
by civil war for any assertion about it to be safe. Portugal, for 
a while scarcely less troubled than Spain by military insurrection, 
has been free from it of late ; and Greece has had the dynasty of 
her kings once changed by revolution. 

If we look outside Europe and beyond the circle of British de- 
pendencies, the phenomena are much the same. The Civil War 
of 1861-1865, in the United States, was as much a war of revolu- 
tion as the war of 17 75-1 782. It was a war carried on by the 
adherents of one set of principles and one construction of the 
constitution against the adherents of another body of principles 

' The whole world is becoming foolish, and wishes to have new constitu- 
tions. — Editors. 



388 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

and another constitutional doctrine. It would be absurd, how- 
ever, to deny the relative stability of the government of the 
United States, which is a political fact of the first importance; 
but the inferences which might be drawn from it are much weak- 
ened, if not destroyed, by the remarkable spectacle furnished by 
the numerous republics set up from the Mexican border line to 
the Straits of Magellan. It would take many of these pages even 
to summarize the whole political history of the Spanish- American 
communities. There have been entire periods of years during 
which some of them have been disputed between the multitude 
and the military, and again when tyrants, as brutal as Caligula or 
Commodus, reigned over them like a Roman Emperor in the 
name of the Roman people. It may be enough to say of one 
of them, Bolivia, which was recently heard of through her part 
in the war on the Pacific coast, that out of fourteen presidents of 
the Bolivian republic thirteen have died assassinated or in 
exile. ^ There is one partial explanation of the inattention of 
English and European politicians to a most striking, instructive, 
and uniform body of facts : Spanish — though, next to English, 
it is the most widely diffused language of the civilized world — 
is little read or spoken in England, France, or Germany. There 
are, however, other theories to account for the universal and 
scarcely intermitted political confusion which at times has 
reigned in all Central and South America, save Chile and the 
Brazilian Empire. It is said that the people are to a great extent 
of Indian blood, and that they have been trained in Roman Ca- 
tholicism. Such arguments would be intelligible if they were used 
by persons who maintained that a highly special and exceptional 
political education is essential to the successful practice of popu- 
lar government ; but they proceed from those who believe that 
there is at least a strong presumption in favor of democratic 
institutions everywhere. And as regards the Roman Catholic 
Church, it should at least be remembered that, whatever else it 
may be, it is a great school of equality. 

I have now given shortly the actual history of popular govern- 
1 Arana, Guerre du Pacifique, vol. vii, p. 33. 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 389 

ment since it was introduced, in its modem shape, into the civ- 
ihzed world. I state the facts, as matter neither for congratu- 
lation nor for lamentation, but simply as materials for opinion. 
It is manifest that, so far as they go, they do little to support the 
assumption that popular government has an indefinitely long 
future before it. Experience rather tends to show that it is 
characterized by great fragility, and that, since its appearance, 
all forms of government have become more insecure than they 
were before. The true reason why the extremely accessible facts 
which I have noticed are so seldom observed and put together is 
that the enthusiasts for popular government, particularly when 
it reposes on a wide basis of suffrage, are actuated by much the 
same spirit as the zealots of Legitimism. They assume their 
principle to have a sanction antecedent to fact. It is not thought 
to be in any way invalidated by practical violations of it, which 
merely constitute so many sins the more against imprescriptable 
right. The convinced partisans of democracy care little for in- 
stances which show democratic governments to be unstable. 
These are merely isolated triumphs of the principle of evil. But 
the conclusion of the sober student of history will not be of this 
kind. He will rather note it as a fact, to be considered in the 
most serious spirit, that since the century during which the Ro- 
man emperors were at the mercy of the praetorian soldiery, there 
has been no such insecurity of government as the world has seen 
since rulers become delegates of the community. 

Is it possible to assign any reasons for this singular modern loss 
of political equilibrium ? I think that it is possible to a certain 
extent. It may be observed that two separate national senti- 
ments have been acting on western Europe since the beginning 
of the present century. To call them by names given to them 
by those who dislike them, one is Imperialism and the other is 
Radicalism. They are not in the least purely British forms of 
opinion, but are coextensive with civilization. Almost all men 
in our day are anxious that their country should be respected 
of all and dependent on none, that it should enjoy greatness and 
perhaps ascendancy ; and this passion for national dignity has gone 



390 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

hand in hand with the desire of the many, ever more and more 
acquiesced in by the few, to have a share of political power under 
the name of liberty, and to govern by rulers who are their dele- 
gates. The two newest and most striking of political creations 
in Europe, the German Empire and the Italian Kingdom, are 
joint products of these forces. But for the first of these coveted 
objects, imperial rank, great armies and fleets, are indispensable, 
and it becomes ever more a necessity that the men under arms 
should be nearly coextensive with the whole of the males in the 
flower of life. It is yet to be seen how far great armies are consist- 
ent with popular government resting on a wide suffrage. No two 
organizations can be more opposed to one another than an army 
scientifically disciplined and equipped, and a nation democrati- 
cally governed. The great military virtue is obedience; the 
great military sin is slackness in obeying. It is forbidden to 
decline to carry out orders, even with the clearest conviction of 
their inexpediency. But the chief democratic right is the right 
to censure superiors ; public opinion, which means censure as 
well as praise, is the motive force of democratic societies. The 
maxims of the two systems flatly contradict one another, and the 
man who would loyally obey both finds his moral constitution 
cut into two halves. It has been found by recent experience that 
the more popular the civil institutions, the harder it is to keep 
the army from meddling with politics. Military insurrections 
are made by officers, but not before every soldier has discovered 
that the share of power which belongs to him as a unit in a regi- 
ment is more valuable than his fragment of power as a unit in a 
constituency. Military revolts are of universal occurrence ; but 
far the largest number have occurred in Spain and the Spanish- 
speaking countries. There have been ingenious explanations 
of the phenomenon, but the manifest explanation is habit. An 
army which has once interfered with politics is under a strong 
temptation to interfere again. It is a far easier and far more 
effective way of causing an opinion to prevail than going to a 
ballot box, and far more profitable to the leaders. I may add 
that, violent as is the improbability of military interference in some 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 391 

countries, there is probably no country except the United States 
in which the army could not control the government, if it were 
of one mind and if it retained its military material. 

Popular governments have been repeatedly overturned by the 
army and the mob in combination ; but on the whole the violent 
destruction of these governments in their more extreme forms 
has been effected by the army, while in their more moderate 
shapes they have had the mob for their principal assailant. It 
is to be observed that in recent times mobs have materially 
changed both their character and their method of attack. A 
mob was once a portion of society in a state of dissolution, a col- 
lection of people who for the time had broken loose from the ties 
which bind society together. It may have had a vague prefer- 
ence for some political or religious cause, but the spirit which 
animated it was mainly one of mischief, or of disorder, or of panic. 
But mobs have now come more and more to be the organs of 
definite opinions. Spanish mobs have impartially worn all colors ; 
but the French mob which overthrew the government of the elder 
Bourbonsini830,whileithad a distinct poHtical object in its wish 
to defeat the aggressive measures of the king, had a further bias 
towards Ultra-Radicalism or Republicanism, which showed itself 
strongly in the insurrectionary movements that followed the ac- 
cession of Louis Philippe to the throne. The mob, which in 1848 
overturned the government of the younger Bourbons, aimed at 
establishing a republic, but it had also a leaning to socialism; 
and the frightful popular insurrection of June, 1848, was entirely 
socialistic. At present, whenever in Europe there is a disturb- 
ance like those created by the old mobs, it is in the interest of the 
parties which style themselves Irreconcilable, and which refuse 
to submit their opinions to the arbitration of any governments, 
however wide be the popular suffrage on which they are based. 
But besides their character, mobs have changed their armament. 
They formerly wrought destruction by the undisciplined force 
of sheer numbers ; but the mob of Paris, the most successful of 
all mobs, owed its success to the barricade. It has now lost this 
advantage ; and a generation is coming to maturity, which per- 



392 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

haps will never have learned that the Paris of to-day has been 
entirely constructed with the view of rendering forever impos- 
sible the old barricade of paving stones in the narrow streets of 
the demolished city. Still more recently, however, the mob has 
obtained new arms. During the last quarter of a century, a 
great part, perhaps the greatest part, of the inventive faculties 
of mankind has been given to the arts of destruction ; and among 
the newly discovered modes of putting an end to human Ufe on a 
large scale, the most effective and terrible is a manipulation of 
explosive compounds quite unknown till the other day. The 
bomb of nitro-glycerine and the parcel of dynamite are as char- 
acteristic of the new enemies of government as their Irrecon- 
cilable opinions. 

There can be no more formidable symptom of our time, and 
none more menacing to popular -gcrv^ernment, than the growth 
of Irreconcilable bodies within the mass of the population. 
Church and State are alike convulsed by them ; but, in civil life, 
Irreconcilables are associations of men who hold political opinions 
as men once held religious opinions. They cling to their creed 
with the same intensity of belief, the same immunity from doubt, 
the same confident expectation of blessedness to come quickly 
which characterizes the disciples of an infant faith. They are 
doubtless a product of democratic sentiment; they have bor- 
rowed from it its promise of a new and good time at hand ; but 
they insist on the immediate redemption of the pledge, and they 
utterly refuse to wait until a popular majority gives effect to their 
opinions. Nor would the vote of such a majority have the least 
authority with them, if it sanctioned any departure from their 
principles. It is possible, and indeed likely, that if the Russians 
voted by universal suffrage to-morrow, they would confirm the 
imperial authority by enormous majorities ; but not a bomb nor 
an ounce of dynamite would be spared to the reigning emperor 
by the Nihilists. The Irreconcilables are of course at feud with 
governments of the older type, but these governments make no 
claim to their support ; on the other hand, they are a portion of 
the governing body of democratic commonwealths, and from 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 393 

this vantage ground they are able to inflict deadly injury on 
popular government. There is in reahty no closer analogy than 
between these infant political creeds and the belligerent religions 
which are constantly springing up even now in parts of the 
world ; for instance, that of the Tae-pings in China. Even in 
our own country we may observe that the earliest political Ir- 
reconcilables were religious or semireligious zealots. Such were 
both the Independents and the Jacobites. Cromwell, who for 
many striking reasons might have been a personage of a much 
later age, was an Irreconcilable at the head of an army ; and we 
all know what he thought of the Parliament which anticipated 
the democratic assemblies of our day. 

Of all modern Irreconcilables, the Nationalists appear to be 
the most impracticable, and of all governments, popular govern- 
ments seem least likely to cope with them successfully. Nobody 
can say exactly what Nationalism is, and indeed the dangerous- 
ness of the theory arises from its vagueness. It seems full of the 
seeds of future civil convulsion. As it is sometimes put, it ap- 
pears to assume that men of one particular race suffer injustice 
if they are placed under the same political institutions with men 
of another race. But Race is quite as ambiguous a term as Na- 
tionality. The earlier philologists had certainly supposed that 
the branches of mankind speaking languages of the same stock 
were somehow connected by blood ; but no scholar now believes 
that this is more than approximately true, for conquest, contact, 
and the ascendancy of a particular literate class, have quite as 
much to do with community of language as common descent. 
Moreover, several of the communities claiming the benefit of the 
new theory are certainly not entitled to it. The Irish are an 
extremely mixed race, and it is only by a perversion of language 
that the Italians can be called a race at all. The fact is that any 
portion of a political society, which has had a somewhat different 
history from the rest of the parts, can take advantage of the 
theory and claim independence, and can thus threaten the entire 
society with dismemberment. Where royal authority survives 
in any vigor, it can to a certain extent deal with these demands. 



394 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

Almost all the civilized states derive their national unity from 
common subjection, past or present, to royal power ; the Ameri- 
cans of the United States, for example, are a nation because they 
once obeyed a king. Hence too it is that such a miscellany of 
races as those which make up the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy 
can be held together, at all events temporarily, by the authority 
of the emperor-king. But democracies are quite paralyzed 
by the plea of Nationality. There is no more effective way of 
attacking them than by admitting the right of the majority to 
govern, but denying that the majority so entitled is the particular 
majority which claims the right. 

The difficulties of popular government, which arise from the 
modern mihtary spirit and from the modern growth of Irrecon- 
cilable parties, could not perhaps have been determined without 
actual experience. But there are other difl&culties which might 
have been divined, because they proceed from the inherent na- 
ture of democracy. In stating some of them, I will endeavor to 
avoid those which are suggested by mere dislike or alarm ; those 
which I propose to specify were in reality noted more than two 
centuries ago by the powerful intellect of Hobbes, and it will be 
seen what light is thrown on some political phenomena of our 
day by his searching analysis. 

Political liberty, said Hobbes, is political power. When a man 
burns to be free, he is not longing for the " desolate freedom of the 
wild ass;" what he wants is a share of political government. 
But, in wide democracies, political power is minced into morsels, 
and each man's portion of it is almost inftnitesimally small. One 
of the first results of this political comminution is described by 
Mr. Justice Stephen in a work ^ of earlier date than that which I 
have quoted above. It is that two of the historical watchwords 
of Democracy exclude one another, and that, where there is 
political Liberty, there can be no Equality. 

" The man who can sweep the greatest number of fragments 
of political power into one heap will govern the rest. The 
strongest man in one form or another will always rule. If the 

' Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality, by Sir James Stephen, 1873, p. 239. 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 395 

government is a military one, the qualities which make a man 
a great soldier will make him a ruler. If the government is a 
monarchy, the qualities which kings value in^ counselors, in 
administrators, in generals, will give power. In a pure democ- 
racy, the ruling men will be the wire-pullers and their friends ; 
but they will be no more on an equality with the people than 
soldiers or ministers of state are on an equality with the sub- 
jects of a monarchy. ... In some ages, a powerful character, 
in others cunning, in others power of transacting business, in 
others eloquence, in others a good hold upon commonplaces 
and a faciUty in applying them to practical purposes, will 
enable a man to cHmb on his neighbors' shoulders and direct 
them this way or that ; but under all circumstances the rank 
and file are directed by leaders of one kind or another who get 
the command of their collective force." 

There is no doubt that, in popular governments resting on a 
wide suffrage, either without an army or having Uttle reason to 
fear it, the leader, whether or not he be cunning, or eloquent, or 
well provided with commonplaces, will be the wire-puller. The 
process of cutting up political power into petty fragments has in 
him its most remarkable product. The morsels of power are so 
small that men, if left to themselves, would not care to employ 
them. In England, they would be largely sold, if the law per- 
mitted it ; in the United States they are extensively sold in spite 
of the law ; and in France, and to a less extent in England, the 
number of "abstentions" shows the small value attributed to 
votes. But the poUtical chiffonier^ who collects and utilizes the 
fragments is the wire-puller. I think, however, that it is too 
much the habit in this country to describe him as a mere organ- 
izer, contriver, and manager. The particular mechanism which 
he constructs is no doubt of much importance. The form of 
this mechanism recently erected in this country has a close re- 
semblance to the system of the Wesleyan Methodists ; one sys- 
tem, however, exists for the purpose of keeping the spirit of 
grace aflame, the other for maintaining the spirit of party at a 
1 Ragman. — Editors. 



396 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

white heat. The wire-puller is not intelligible unless we take 
into account one of the strongest forces acting on human nature 
— party feeling. Party feeling is probably far more a survival of 
the primitive combativeness of mankind than a consequence of 
conscious intellectual differences between man and man. It is 
essentially the same sentiment which in certain states of society 
leads to civil, intertribal, or international war ; and it is as uni- 
versal as humanity. It is better studied in its more irrational 
manifestations than in those to which we are accustomed. It is 
said that Australian savages will travel half over the Australian 
continent to take in a fight the side of combatants who wear the 
same totem as themselves. Two Irish factions who broke one 
another's heads over the whole island are said to have originated 
in a quarrel about the color of a cow. In southern India a 
series of dangerous riots are constantly arising through the ri- 
valry of parties who know no more of one another than that some 
of them belong to the party of the right hand and others to that 
of the left hand. Once a year, large numbers of English ladies 
and gentlemen, who have no serious reason for preferring one 
university to the other, wear dark or light blue colors to signify 
good wishes for the success of Oxford or Cambridge in a cricket 
match or boat race. Party differences, properly so-called, are 
supposed to indicate intellectual, or moral, or historical prefer- 
ences ; but these go a very little way down into the population ; 
and by the bulk of partisans they are hardly understood and soon 
forgotten. "Guelf " and "Ghibelline" had once a meaning, but 
men were under perpetual banishment from their native land for 
belonging to one or other of these parties long after nobody 
knew in what the difference consisted. Some men are Tories or 
Whigs by conviction ; but thousands upon thousands of electors 
vote simply for yellow, blue, or purple, caught at most by the 
appeals of some popular orator. 

It is through this great natural tendency to take sides that the 
wire-puller works. Without it he would be powerless. His 
business is to fan its flame ; to keep it constantly acting upon 
the man who has once declared himself a partisan; to make 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 397 

escape from it difficult and distasteful. His art is that of the 
nonconformist preacher, who gave importance to a body of 
commonplace religionists by persuading them to wear a uniform 
and take a military title, or of the man who made the success 
of a temperance society by prevaihng on its members to wear 
always and openly a blue ribbon. In the long run, these con- 
trivances cannot be confined to any one party, and their effects 
on all parties and their leaders, and on the whole ruling de- 
mocracy, must be in the highest degree serious and lasting. The 
first of these effects will be, I think, to make all parties very like 
one another, and indeed in the end almost indistinguishable, 
however leaders may quarrel and partisan hate partisan. In 
the next place, each party will probably become more and more 
homogeneous; and the opinions it professes, and the policy 
which is the outcome of those opinions, will less and less reflect 
the individual mind of any leader, but only the ideas which seem 
to that mind to be most likely to win favor with the greatest 
number of supporters. Lastly, the wire-pulling system, when 
fully developed, will infallibly lead to the constant enlargement 
of the area of suffrage. What is called universal suffrage has 
greatly declined in the estimation, not only of philosophers 
who follow Bentham, but of the a priori theorists who assumed 
that it was the inseparable accompaniment of a republic, but 
who found that in practice it was the natural basis of a tyranny. 
But extensions of the suffrage, though no longer believed to be 
good in themselves, have now a permanent place in the armory 
of parties, and are sure to be a favorite weapon of the wire- 
puller. The Athenian statesmen who, worsted in a quarrel 
of aristocratic cliques, "took the people into partnership," 
have a close parallel in the modern politicians who introduce 
household suffrage into towns to "dish" one side, and into 
counties to "dish" the other. 

Let us now suppose the competition of parties, stimulated to 
the utmost by the modern contrivances of the wire-puller, to 
have produced an electoral system under which every adult 
male has a vote, and perhaps every adult female. Let us 



398 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

assume that the new machinery has extracted a vote from every 
one of these electors. How is the result to be expressed ? It is, 
that the average opinion of a great multitude has been obtained, 
and that this average opinion becomes the basis and standard of 
all government and law. There is hardly any experience of the 
way in which such a system would work, except in the eyes of 
those who believe that history began since their own birth. The 
universal suffrage of white males in the United States is about 
fifty years old ; that of white and black is less than twenty. The 
French threw away universal suffrage after the Reign of Terror ; 
it was twice revived in France, that the Napoleonic tyranny 
might be founded on it ; and it was introduced into Germany, 
that the personal power of Prince Bismarck might be con- 
firmed. But one of the strangest of vulgar ideas is that a very 
wide suffrage could or would promote progress, new ideas, new 
discoveries and inventions, new arts of life. Such a suffrage is 
commonly associated with Radicalism; and no doubt amid its 
most certain effects would be the extensive destruction of 
existing institutions ; but the chances are that, in the long run, 
it would produce a mischievous form of Conservatism, and drug 
society with a potion compared with which Eldonine would be 
a salutary draught. For to what end, towards what ideal 
state, is the process of stamping upon law the average opinion 
of an entire community directed ? The end arrived at is 
identical with that of the Roman Catholic Church, which 
attributes a similar sacredness to the average opinion of the 
Christian world. "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omni- 
bus,"^ was the canon of Vincent of Lerins. "Securus judicat 
orbis terrarum," ^ were the words which rang in the ears of 
Newman and produced such marvelous effects on him. But did 
any one in his senses ever suppose that these were maxims of 
progress? The principles of legislation at which they point 
would probably put an end to all social and political activities, 
and arrest everything which has ever been associated with Liber- 

1 What is approved always, everywhere, and by all. — • Editors. 

2 The world is secure in its judgment. — Editors. 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 399 

alism. A moment's reflection will satisfy any competently 
instructed person that this is not too broad a proposition. Let 
him turn over in his mind the great epochs of scientific invention 
and social change during the last two centuries, and consider what 
would have occurred if universal suffrage had been established 
at any one of them. Universal suffrage, which to-day excludes 
Free Trade from the United States, would certainly have pro- 
hibited the spinning jenny and the power loom. It would 
certainly have forbidden the threshing machine. It would have 
prevented the adoption of the Gregorian calendar; and it 
would have restored the Stuarts. It would have proscribed the 
Roman Catholics with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield's 
house and library in 1780, and it would have proscribed the Dis- 
senters with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley's house and 
library in 1791. 

There are possibly many persons who, without denying these 
conclusions in the past, tacitly assume that no such mistakes 
will be committed in the future, because the community is 
already too enlightened for them, and will become more en- 
lightened through popular education. But without questioning 
the advantages of popular education under certain aspects, its 
manifest tendency is to diffuse popular commonplaces, to fasten 
them on the mind at the time when it is most easily impressed, 
and thus to stereotype average opinion. It is of course pos- 
sible that universal suffrage would not now force on govern- 
ments the same legislation which it would infallibly have 
dictated a hundred years ago; but then we are necessarily 
ignorant of what germs of social and material improvement 
there may be in the womb of time, and how far they may con- 
flict with the popular prejudice which hereafter will be omnip- 
otent. There is in fact just enough evidence to show that even 
now there is a marked antagonism between democratic opinion 
and scientific truth as applied to human societies. The central 
seat in all political economy was from the first occupied by the 
theory of population. This theory has now been generalized by 
Mr. Darwin and his followers, and, stated as the principle of 



400 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

the survival of the fittest, it has become the central truth of all 
biological science. Yet it is evidently disliked by the multitude, 
and thrust into the background by those whom the multitude 
permits to lead it. It has long been intensely unpopular in 
France and the continent of Europe; and, among ourselves, 
proposals for recognizing it through the relief of distress by 
emigration are visibly being supplanted by schemes founded on 
the assumption that, through legislative experiments on society, 
a given space of land may always be made to support in com- 
fort the population which from historical causes has come to be 
settled on it. 

It is perhaps hoped that this opposition between democracy 
and science, which certainly does not promise much for the 
longevity of popular government, may be neutralized by the 
ascendancy of instructed leaders. Possibly the proposition 
would not be very unsafe, that he who calls himself a friend of 
democracy because he believes that it will be always under wise 
guidance is in reality, whether he knows it or not, an enemy of 
democracy. But at all events the signs of our times are not at 
all of favorable augury for the future direction of great multi- 
tudes by statesmen wiser than themselves. The relation of 
political leaders to political followers seems to me to be under- 
going a twofold change. The leaders may be as able and elo- 
quent as ever, and some of them certainly appear to have an 
unprecedentedly "good hold upon commonplaces, and a facility 
in applying them ;" but they are manifestly listening nervously 
at one end of a speaking tube which receives at its other end 
the suggestions of a lower intelligence. On the other hand, the 
followers, who are really the rulers, are manifestly becoming 
impatient of the hesitations of their nominal chiefs, and the 
wrangling of their representatives. I am very desirous of 
keeping aloof from questions disputed between the two great 
English parties; but it certainly seems to me that all over Con- 
tinental Europe, and to some extent in the United States, parlia- 
mentary debates are becoming ever more formal and perfunc- 
tory, they are more and more liable to being peremptorily cut 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 401 

short, and the true springs of policy are more and more limited 
to clubs and associations deep below the level of the highest 
education and experience. There is one state or group of states, 
whose political condition deserves particular attention. This is 
Switzerland, a country to which the student of politics may 
always look with advantage for the latest forms and results of 
democratic experiment. About forty years ago, just when Mr. 
Grote was giving to the world the earliest volumes of his 
History of Greece, he pubUshed Seven Letters on the Recent 
Politics of Switzerland, explaining that his interest in the Swiss 
cantons arose from their presenting "a certain analogy nowhere 
else to be found in Europe" to the ancient Greek states. Now, 
if Grote had one object more than another at heart in writing his 
history, it was to show, by the example of the Athenian de- 
mocracy, that wide popular governments, so far from meriting 
the reproach of fickleness, are sometimes characterized by the 
utmost tenacity of attachment, and will follow the counsels 
of a wise leader, Uke Pericles, at the cost of any amount of suffer- 
ing, and may even be led by an unwise leader, like Nicias, to the 
very verge of destruction. But he had the acuteness to discern 
in Switzerland the particular democratic institution which was 
likely to tempt democracies into dispensing with prudent and 
independent direction. He speaks with the strongest disap- 
proval of a provision in the constitution of Lucerne, by which 
all laws passed by the Legislative Council were to be submitted 
for veto or sanction to the vote of the people throughout the 
canton. This was originally a contrivance of the ultra-Catholic 
party, and was intended to neutralize the opinions of the Catholic 
Liberals by bringing to bear on them the average opinion of the 
whole cantonal population. A year after Mr. Grote had pub- 
lished his Seven Letters, \h.e French Revolution of 1848 occurred, 
and three years later, the violent overthrow of the democratic 
institutions established by the French National Assembly was 
consecrated by the very method of voting which he had con- 
demned, under the name of the Plebiscite. The arguments of 
the French Liberal party against the Plebiscite, during the 



402 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

twenty years of stern despotism which it entailed upon France 
have always appeared to me to be arguments in reality against 
the very principle of democracy. After the misfortunes of 
1870, the Bonapartes and the .Plebiscite were alike involved in 
the deepest unpopularity ; but it seems impossible to doubt that 
Gambetta, by his agitation for the scrutin de liste, was attempting 
to recover as much as he could of the plebiscitary system of 
voting. Meantime, it has become, in various shapes, one of 
the most characteristic of Swiss institutions. One article of the 
federal constitution provides that, if fifty thousand Swiss citi- 
zens, entitled to vote, demand the revision of the constitution, 
the question whether the constitution be revised shall be put to 
the vote of the people of Switzerland, "aye" or "no." Another 
enacts that, on the petition of thirty thousand citizens, every 
federal law and every federal decree, which is not urgent, 
shall be subject to the referendiim; that is, it shall be put to 
the popular vote. These provisions, that when a certain num- 
ber of voters demand a particular measure, or require a further 
sanction for a particular enactment, it shall be put to the vote 
of the whole country, seem to me to have a considerable future 
before them in democratically governed societies. When Mr. 
Labouchere told the House of Commons in 1882 that the people 
were tired of the deluge of debate, and would some day substitute 
for it the direct consultation of the constituencies, he had more facts 
to support his opinion than his auditors were perhaps aware of. 

Here then we have one great inherent infirmity of popular 
governments, an infirmity deducible from the principle of 
Hobbes, that liberty is power cut into fragments. Popular 
governments can only be worked by a process which inciden- 
tally entails the further subdivision of the morsels of political 
power; and thus the tendency of these governments, as they 
widen their electoral basis, is towards a dead level of common- 
place opinion, which they are forced to adopt as the standard 
of legislation and policy. The evils likely to be thus produced 
are rather those vulgarly associated with ultra-Conservatism 
than those of ultra-Radicalism. So far indeed as the human 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 403 

race has experience, it is not by political societies in any way 
resembling those now called democracies that human improve- 
ment has been carried on. History, said Strauss — and, con- 
sidering his actual part in life, this is perhaps the last opinion 
which might have been expected from him — History is a sound 
aristocrat.^ There may be oligarchies close enough and jealous 
enough to stifle thought as completely as an Oriental despot 
who is at the same time the pontiff of a religion ; but the prog- 
ress of mankind has hitherto been effected by the rise and fall of 
aristocracies, by the formation of one aristocracy within another, 
or by the succession of one aristocracy to another. There have 
been so-called democracies which haVe rendered services beyond 
price to civilization, but they were only peculiar forms of aris- 
tocracy. The short-lived Athenian democracy, under whose 
shelter art, science, and philosophy shot so wonderfully up- 
wards, was only an aristocracy which rose on the ruins of one 
much narrower. The splendor which attracted the original 
genius of the then civilized world to Athens was provided by the 
severe taxation of a thousand subject cities ; and the skilled 
laborers who worked under Phidias, and who built the Parthe- 
non, were slaves. 

The infirmities of popular government, which consist in its 
occasional wanton destructiveness, have been frequently dwelt 
upon and require^ less attention. In the long run, the most 
interesting question which they suggest is, to what social results 
does the progressive overthrow of existing institutions promise 
to conduct mankind? I will again quote Mr. Labouchere, 
who is not the less instructive because he may perhaps be sus- 
pected of taking a certain malicious pleasure in stating roundly 
what many persons who employ the same political watchwords 
as himself are reluctant to say in public, and possibly shrink 
from admitting to themselves in their own minds. 

^ The opinion of Strauss appears to be shared by M. Ernest Renan. It 
occurs twice in the singular piece which he calls Caliban. "Toute civilisa- 
tion est d'origine aristocratique " (p. 77). "Toute civilisation est I'cEuvre 
des aristocrates " (p. 91). 



404 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

"Democrats are told that they are dreamers, and why? 
Because they assert that, if power be placed in the hands of 
the many, the many will exercise it for their own benefit. Is 
it not a still wilder dream to suppose that the many will in 
future possess power, and use it not to secure what they con- 
sider to be their interests, but to serve those of others ? . . . 
Is it imagined that artisans in our great manufacturing towns 
are so satisfied with their present position that they will hurry 
to the polls, to register their votes in favor of a system which 
divides us socially, politically, and economically, into classes, 
and places them at the bottom with hardly a possibility of 
rising ? , . . Is the lot (of the agricultural laborer) so happy 
a one that he will humbly and cheerfully afiix his cross to the 
name of the man who tells him that it can never be changed 
for the better ? . . . We know that artisans and agricultural 
laborers will approach the consideration of political and social 
problems with fresh and vigorous minds. . . . For the mo- 
ment, we demand the equalization of the franchise. . . . Our 
next demands will be electoral districts, cheap elections, pay- 
ment of members, and abolition of hereditary legislators. 
When our demands are complied with, we shall be thankful, 
but we shall not rest. On the contrary, having forged an 
instrument for democratic legislation, we shall use it." ^ 

The persons who charged Mr. Labouchere with dreaming 
because he thus predicted the probable course, and defined the 
natural principles, of future democratic legislation, seem to 
me to have done him much injustice. His forecast of political 
events is extremely rational ; and I cannot but agree with him 
in thinking it absurd to suppose that, if the hard-toiled and the 
needy, the artisan and the agricultural laborer, become the 
depositaries of power, and if they can find agents through whom 
it becomes possible for them to exercise it, they will not employ 
it for what they may be led to believe are their own interests. 
But in an inquiry whether, independently of the alarm or enthu- 
siasm which they excite in certain persons or classes, democratic 
^ Fortnightly Review, March i, 1883. 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 405 

institutions contain any seed of dissolution or extinction, Mr. 
Labouchere's speculation becomes most interesting just where it 
stops. What is to be the nature of the legislation by which the 
lot of the artisan and of the agricultural laborer is to be not 
merely altered for the better, but exchanged for whatever 
station and fortune they may think it possible to confer on them- 
selves by their own supreme authority? Mr. Labouchere's 
language, in the above passage and in other parts of his paper, 
like that of many persons who agree with him in the belief that 
government can indefinitely increase human happiness, un- 
doubtedly suggests the opinion that the stock of good things in 
the world is practically unlimited in quantity, that it is (so to 
speak) contained in a vast storehouse or granary, and that out 
of this it is now doled in unequal shares and unfair proportions. 
It is this unfairness and inequality which democratic law will 
some day correct. Now I am not concerned to deny that, at 
various times during the history of mankind, narrow oligarchies 
have kept too much of the wealth of the world to themselves, 
or that false economical systems have occasionally diminished 
the total supply of wealth, and, by their indirect operation, have 
caused it to be irrationally distributed. Yet nothing is more 
certain than that the mental picture which enchains the en- 
thusiasts for benevolent democratic government is altogether 
false, and that, if the mass of mankind were to make an attempt 
at redividing the common stock of good things, they would 
resemble, not a number of claimants insisting on the fair division 
of a fund, but a mutinous crew, feasting on a ship's provisions, 
gorging themselves on the meat and intoxicating themselves 
with the liquors, but refusing to navigate the vessel to port. 
It is among the simplest of economical truths, that far the largest 
part of the wealth of the world is constantly perishing by con- 
sumption, and that, if it be not renewed by perpetual toil and 
adventure, either the human race, or the particular community 
making the experiment of resting without being thankful, will 
be extinguished or brought to the very verge of extinction. 
This position, although it depends in part on a truth of which. 



4o6 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

according to John Stuart Mill/ nobody is habitually aware 
who has not bestowed some thought on the matter, admits of 
very simple illustration. It used to be a question hotly debated 
among economists how it was that countries recovered with such 
surprising rapidity from the effects of the most destructive and 
desolating wars. "An enemy lays waste a country by fire and 
sword, and destroys or carries away nearly all the movable 
wealth existing in it, and yet, in a few years after, everything 
is much as it was before." Mill,^ following Chalmers, gives the 
convincing explanation that nothing in such a case has hap- 
pened which would not have occurred in any circumstances. 
"What the enemy has destroyed would have been destroyed in 
a little time by the inhabitants themselves; the wealth which 
they so rapidly reproduce would have needed to be reproduced 
and would have been reproduced in any case, and probably in 
as short an interval." In fact, the fund by which the life of the 
human race and of each particular society is sustained, is never 
in a statical condition. It is no more in that condition than is 
a cloud in the sky, which is perpetually dissolving and perpet- 
ually renewing itself. "Everything which is produced is con- 
sumed ; both what is saved and what is said to be spent ; and 
the former quite as rapidly as the latter." The wealth of man- 
kind is the result of a continuing process, everywhere complex 
and delicate, and nowhere of such complexity and delicacy as 
in the British Islands. So long as this process goes on under 
existing influences, it is not, as we have seen, interrupted by 
earthquake, flood, or war ; and, at each of its steps, the wealth 
which perishes and revives has a tendency to increase. But 
if we alter the character or diminish the force of these influences, 
are we sure that wealth, instead of increasing, will not dwindle 
and perhaps disappear ? Mill notes an exception to the revival 
of a country after war. It may be depopulated, and if there 
are not men to carry it on, the process of reproduction will 
stop. But may it not be arrested by any means short of exter- 
minating the population ? An experience, happily now rare in 
1 Mill, Principles of Political Economy, i, 5. 5. ^ Ibid., i, 5. 7. 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 407 

the world, shows that wealth may come very near to perishing 
through diminished energy in the motives of the men who repro- 
duce it. You may, so to speak, take the heart and spirit out 
of the laborers to such an extent that they do not care to work. 
Jeremy Bentham observed about a century ago that the Turkish 
government had in his day impoverished some of the richest 
countries in the world far- more by its action on motives than by 
its positive exactions ; and it has always appeared to me that 
the destruction of the vast wealth accumulated under the 
Roman Empire, one of the most orderly and efficient of govern- 
ments, and the decline of western Europe into the squalor and 
poverty of the Middle Ages, can only be accounted for on the 
same principle. The failure of reproduction through relaxation 
of motives was once an everyday phenomenon in the East ; 
and this explains to students of Oriental history why it is that 
throughout its course a reputation for statesmanship was always 
a reputation for financial statesmanship. In the early days of 
the East India Company, villages "broken by a severe settle- 
ment" were constantly calling for the attention of the govern- 
ment ; the assessment on them did not appear to be excessive 
on English fiscal principles, but it had been heavy enough to 
press down the motives to labor, so that they could barely recover 
themselves. The phenomenon, however, is not confined to the 
East, where no doubt the motives to toil are more easily affected 
than in western societies. No later than the end of the last 
century, large portions of the French peasantry ceased to culti- 
vate their land, and large numbers of French artisans declined 
to work, in despair at the vast requisitions of the Revolutionary 
Government during the Reign of Terror ; and, as might be 
expected, the penal law had to be called in to compel their return 
to their ordinary occupations.^ 

It is perfectly possible, I think, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has 
shown in a recent admirable volume,^ to revive even in our day 

1 Taine, Origines de la France Contemporaine, torn, iii., "La Revolution." 
See, as to artisans, p. 75 (note), and as to cultivators, p. 511. 

2 Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State. London, 1884. 



4o8 HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

the fiscal tyranny which once left even European populations in 
doubt whether it was worth while preser\dng life by thrift and 
toil. You have only to tempt a portion of the population into 
temporary idleness by promising them a share in a fictitious 
hoard lying (as Mill puts it) in an imaginary strong box which 
is supposed to contain all human wealth. You have only to 
take the heart out of those who would willingly labor and save 
by taxing them ad misericordiam for the most laudable phil- 
anthropic objects. For it makes not the smallest difference to 
the motives of the thrifty and industrious part of mankind 
whether their fiscal oppressor be an Eastern despot, or a feudal 
baron, or a democratic legislature, and whether they are taxed 
for the benefit of a corporation called Society, or for the advan- 
tage of an individual styled King or Lord. Here then is the 
great question about democratic legislation, when carried to 
more than a moderate length. How will it affect human mo- 
tives? What motives will it substitute for those now acting 
on men ? The motives, which at present impel mankind to the 
labor and pain which produce the resuscitation of wealth in 
ever-increasing quantities, are such as infallibly to entail in- 
equality in the distribution of wealth. They are the springs 
of action called into activity by the strenuous and never-ending 
struggle for existence, the beneficent private war which makes 
one man strive to climb on the shoulders of another and remain 
there through the law of the survival of the fittest. 

These truths are best exemplified in the part of the world to 
which the superficial thinker would perhaps look for the triumph 
of the opposite principle. The United States have justly been 
called the home of the disinherited of the earth; but, if those 
vanquished under one sky in the struggle for existence had not 
continued under another the same battle in which they had been 
once worsted, there would have been no such exploit performed 
as the cultivation of the vast American territory from end to 
end and from side to side. There could be no grosser delusion 
than to suppose this result to have been attained by democratic 
legislation. It has really been obtained through the sifting out 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 409 

of the strongest by natural selection. The government of the 
United States, which I examine in another part of this volume, 
now rests on universal suffrage, but then it is only a political 
government. It is a government under which coercive restraint, 
except in politics, is reduced to a minimum. There has hardly 
ever before been a community in which the weak have been 
pushed so pitilessly to the wall, in which those who have suc- 
ceeded have so uniformly been the strong, and in which in so short 
a time there has arisen so great an inequality of private fortune 
and domestic luxury. And at the same time, there has never 
been a country in which, on the whole, the persons distanced 
in the race have suffered so little from their ill-success. All this 
beneficent prosperity is the fruit of recognizing the principle 
of population, and the one remedy for its excess in perpetual 
emigration. It all reposes on the sacredness of contract and the 
stability of private property, the first the implement, and the 
last the reward, of success in the universal competition. These, 
however, are all principles and institutions which the British 
friends of the "artisan " and " agricultural laborer " seem not a little 
inclined to treat as their ancestors did agricultural and industrial 
machinery. The Americans are still of opinion that more is 
to be got for human happiness by private energy than by public 
legislation. The Irish, however, even in the United States, are 
of another opinion, and the Irish opinion is manifestly rising 
into favor here. But on the question, whether future democratic 
legislation will follow the new opinion, the prospects of popular 
government to a great extent depend. There are two sets of 
motives, and two only, by which the great bulk of the materials 
of human subsistence and comfort have hitherto been produced 
and reproduced. One has led to the cultivation of the territory 
of the Northern States of the American Union, from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific. The other had a considerable share in bringing 
about the industrial and agricultural progress of the Southern 
States, and in old days it produced the wonderful prosperity of 
Peru under the Incas. One system is economical competition ; 
the other consists in the daily task, perhaps fairly and kindly 



4IO HENRY SUMNER MAINE 

allotted, but enforced by the prison or the scourge. So far as 
we have any experience to teach us, we are driven to the conclu- 
sion that every society of men must adopt one system or the 
other, or it will pass through penury to starvation. 

I have thus shown that popular governments of the modern 
type have not hitherto proved stable as compared with other 
forms of political rule, and that they include certain sources of 
weakness which do not promise security for them in the near 
or remote future. My chief conclusion can only be stated nega- 
tively. There is not at present sufficient evidence to warrant 
the common belief that these governments are likely to be of 
indefinitely long duration. There is, however, one positive 
conclusion from which no one can escape who bases a forecast 
of the prospects of popular government, not on moral preference 
or a priori assumption, but on actual experience as witness by 
history. If there be any reason for thinking that constitutional 
freedom will last, it is a reason furnished by a particular set of 
facts, with which Englishmen ought to be familiar, but of which 
many of them, under the empire of prevailing ideas, are exceed- 
ingly apt to miss the significance. The British constitution 
has existed for a considerable length of time, and therefore free 
institutions generally may continue to exist. I am quite aware 
that this will seem to some a commonplace conclusion, perhaps as 
commonplace as the conclusion of M. Taine, who, after describ- 
ing the conquest of all France by the Jacobin Club, declares that 
his inference is so simple, that he hardly ventures to state it. 
"Jusqua'a present, je n'ai guere trouve qu'un (principe) si 
simple qu'il semblera pueril et que j'ose a peine I'enoncer. II 
consiste tout entier dans cette remarque, qu'une societe humaine, 
surtout une societe moderne, est une chose vaste et compliquee." ^ 
This observation, that "a human society, and particularly a 

1 Up to the present I have found scarcely more than a single generaliza- 
tion, which is so simple that it will seem childish, and that I hardly ven- 
ture to pronounce it. It consists wholly in this observation : that a human 
society, especially a modern society, is a thing vast and complicated. — • 
Editors. 



THE PROSPECTS OF POPULAR GOVERNMENT 411 

modern society, is a vast and complicated thing," is in fact the 
very proposition which Burke enforced with all the splendor 
of his eloquence and all the power of his argument; but, as 
Taine says, it may now seem to some too simple and common- 
place to be worth putting into words. In the same way, many 
persons in whom familiarity has bred contempt, may think it a 
trivial observation that the British constitution, if not (as some 
call it) a holy thing, is a thing unique and remarkable. A series 
of undesigned changes brought it to such a condition that satis- 
faction and impatience, the two great sources of political conduct, 
were both reasonably gratified under it. In this condition it 
became, not r netap jiorically but literally, the envy of the 
world, and the world took on all sides to cop3dng it. The 
imitations have not been generally happy. One nation alone, 
consisting of Englishmen, has practiced a modification of it 
successfully, amidst abounding material plenty. It is not too 
much to say, that the only evidence worth mentioning for the 
duration of popular government is to be found in the success 
of the British constitution during two centuries under special 
conditions, and in the success of the American constitution 
during one century under conditions still more peculiar and more 
unlikely to recur. Yet, so far as our own constitution is con- 
cerned, that nice balance of attractions, which caused it to move 
evenly on its stately path, is perhaps destined to be disturbed. 
One of the forces governing it may gain dangerously at the 
expense of the other ; but the British political system, with the 
national greatness and material prosperity attendant on it, 
may yet be launched into space and find its last affinities in 
silence and cold. 



XIV 
ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT i 

Arthur Twining Hadley 

[Arthur Twining Hadley (1856-) has been all his life associated with 
Yale University, as student, tutor, instructor, professor, and since 1899 as 
its president. President Hadley's special field of interest has been political 
science and political economy, particularly the practical questions of rail- 
roads and transportation, on which he is regarded as one of the first 
authorities in the country. For this reason he was appointed by President 
Taft in 1910 as head of the Railroad Securities Commission. 

The following address on the Ethics of Corporate Management emphasizes 
the importance of high moral standards in business relations, an idea which 
is expressed in many of the author's writings and addresses. This point of 
view underlies the whole of President Hadley's treatment of the problems 
of monopoly. These problems, he thinks, cannot be effectively solved 
either by restrictive legislation or by any of the patent schemes for indus- 
trial reform, but only by the cultivation of a wider sense of responsibility 
and fair deahiig on the part of corporations. 

The Ethics of Corporate M anagement was one of the Kennedy Lectures for 
1906, in the School of Philanthropy, New York. It was first pubUshed in 
the North American, January, 1907, and in the same year included with 
the other lectures of the series in the author's Standards of Public 
Morality.] 

When I go to a responsible store to make a purchase, I have 
every reason to believe that the price charged will be a fair one. 
I may not like the goods ; I may not feel that I can afford the 
price ; but if I like the goods and can afford the price, I assume 
that I am not being cheated. The competition of different estab- 
lishments makes the general scale of charges just; and public 
sentiment in favor of a one-price system assures me that I shall 

' Reprinted by permission from Standards of Public Morality, by Arthur 
Twining Hadley (The Macmillan Co.). 

412 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 



413 



have the benefit of this general scale of charges in my own par- 
ticular case. 

If I go to a bank to borrow money on good security, I have the 
same feeling. The competition of responsible borrowers on the 
one hand, and responsible lenders on the other, makes a fair 
interest rate at which the number of those who can give good 
security for the management of other people's capital absorbs 
the ofiferings of those who are willing to lend their money. Or, 
if I try to sell my services in any of the recognized lines of 
industry, I have confidence that both the self-interest and self- 
respect of the man with whom I am dealing will lead him to offer 
me a fair market rate, and that the scale of wages or fees thus 
created will be more advantageous on the whole than anything 
which could be devised by law. 

Of course there are numerous exceptions. The man or woman 
who hires a cab is by no means certain that the self-respect of the 
cabman will lead him to believe in a one-price system ; and while 
the competition of different cabs with one another may make a 
fair enough average rate of compensation, there is great probabil- 
ity that extortion will be practiced in individual instances. 
Therefore the law steps in to regulate the price of cabs. The 
man or woman who has occasion to borrow of a pawnbroker has 
no assurance that the pawnbroker will believe in a one-price 
system or give the benefit of a market rate of interest. Hence 
there is a good deal of well-founded demand for usury laws. The 
only reason why we do not have them is because the advocates 
of such laws generally object to interest in itself, rather than to 
extortionate variations from market rates of interest. 

But the most important cases of departure from the one-price 
system, and of apparent need of some further protection than is 
given by competition, do not come in connection with cabs or 
pawnbrokers or other minor industries of any kind. They come 
in connection with the dealings of large corporations which 
obtain a monopoly of the market for some line of goods or 
services. 

In his charmingly practical book on Politics, Aristotle tells 



414 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

two stories which are of perennial interest to the student of 
industrial combination. In the first of these he relates how 
Thales of Miletus was a great philosopher, but was reproached 
by his neighbors because he was not as rich as they were. By 
his acquaintance with astronomy, Thales foresaw that there 
would be large crops of olives ; and he purchased all the olive 
presses of Miletus, depositing a very small sum in each case so 
as to make the transaction complete. When the olives were 
ripe, behold ! there was no one but Thales to rent men the 
presses whereby they might make their oil ; and Thales, who was 
thus able to charge what price he pleased, realized an enormous 
sum. He did this, says Aristotle, not because he cared for the 
money, but to show his neighbors that a philosopher can be 
richer than anybody else if he wants to, and if he is not, it simply 
proves that he has more worthy objects of contemplation. 

There was a man in Syracuse, Aristotle goes on to say, in the 
days of Dionysius the Tyrant, who bought all the iron in Sicily 
on so narrow a margin that without raising the price very much 
he was able to make twice the amount of his total investment in a 
short time. When Dionysius the Tyrant heard of this, he was 
pleased with the ingenuity of the man ; and he told him that he 
might keep his money, but that he had better leave Syracuse. 

These stories show plainly enough that monopolies are no new 
thing ; that more than two thousand years ago there was a 
Standard Oil Company of Asia Minor and a United States Steel 
Corporation of Sicily; and that the President of the United 
States is by no means the first monarch who has addressed him- 
self somewhat aggressively to the problem of trust regulation. 
But in ancient times these monopolies of producers or merchants 
were an exception ; now they are becoming the general rule. 

The development of the power loom and the spinning machine 
in the middle of the eighteenth century, followed shortly by that 
of the steam engine, substituted a system of centralized industry, 
where a number of people work together, for the scattered in- 
dustry of the older times, where people worked separately. The 
invention of the steamship and the railroad enabled the large 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 415 

factories of modern times to send their goods all over the world, 
and allowed the establishments to increase in size as long as any 
economy in production was to be gained by such an increase. 
The capital required for these large industries was far beyond the 
power of any one man or any small group of partners to furnish. 
The modern industrial corporation, with free transfer of stock, 
limited liability of the shareholders, and representative govern- 
ment through a board of directors, was developed as a means of 
meeting this need for capital. Men who could take no direct 
part in the management of an industrial enterprise, and whose 
capital was only a very small fraction of what was needed for the 
purpose, could, under the system of limited liability, safely 
associate themselves with a hundred or a thousand others to 
take the chance of profit which concentration of capital afforded. 

These industrial units soon became so large that a single one of 
them was able to supply the whole market. Competition was 
done away with, and monopoly took its place. This effect was 
first felt in the case of railroad transportation. You could not 
generally have the choice between two independent lines of rail- 
road, because business which would furnish a profit to one line 
was generally quite inadequate to support a second. Nor could 
you hope for the competition of different owners of locomotives 
and cars on the same line of track, because of the opportunities for 
accident and loss to which such a system was exposed. In Eng- 
land, indeed, they were impressed with the analogy of a railroad 
to a turnpike or canal, and for nearly half a century after the 
establishment of railroads they made all their laws on the sup- 
position that cars and locomotives would be owned by different 
people. But the failure of these laws, when so persistently en- 
acted and backed by a conservatism of feeling so strong as that 
of the English nation, is the best proof of the impracticability of 
the scheme. By 1850 it became pretty clear that most railroads 
had a monopoly of their local business. By 1870 the conse- 
quences of this monopoly had become quite clearly apparent. 

These consequences were in some respects good and in some 
respects bad. The railroad managers were quick to introduce 



41 6 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

improvements and to effect economy of organization. These im- 
provements allowed them to make rates very low on long-dis- 
tance business in general, and particularly on business which 
came into competition with other railroads or with water routes. 
But the extreme lowness of these through rates only emphasized 
the glaring inequality between the treatment of the through or 
competitive business, and the local business of which the railroad 
had a monopoly. On the old turnpike the cost of transportation 
had been high, but the shipper could rely upon the price as fair. 
There was always enough competition between different carriers 
to prevent them from making extortionate profits on any one 
shipment. On the railroad which took the place of the turnpike 
the cost of transportation was very much lower, but there was 
no assurance whatever of fairness. The local rates were some- 
times kept two or three times as high as the through ones ; and 
the shipper had to see carloads of freight hauled to market past 
his house from more distant points at twenty-five dollars a car- 
load, when he himself was paying fifty dollars a carload for but 
a part of the same haulage. Nor was this the worst. Arbitrary 
differences between places were bad enough; but there was a 
similar discrimination between different persons in the same place. 
The local freight agent was a sort of almoner of the corporation. 
The man who gained his ear, whether by honest means or not, got 
a low rate. The man who failed to get the ear of the freight 
agent had to pay a much higher rate for the same service. 

In this country things were at their worst in the years imme- 
diately following the Civil War. While we had a one-price sys- 
tem in the trade of the country, both wholesale and retail, and in 
its banking, and to a large degree in its labor market, the whole 
system of American railroad rates was run on principles which a 
decently conducted store would have scorned to admit into its 
management. Our industrial methods had changed too fast for 
our ethics to keep pace with them. In the old-fashioned lines 
of business people were allowed to charge what prices they 
pleased, because competition kept their power of making mis- 
takes within narrow limits. In the local railroad freight business 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 417 

competition was done away with, and the managers did not see 
the necessity of substituting any other legal or moral restraint in 
its stead. In fact, they asserted a constitutional right to be free 
of all other legal or moral restraints. They regarded the liberty 
to serve the public in their own way, which had been allowed 
them under the competitive system, as carrying with it a right 
to hurt the public in their own way when the protection of compe- 
tition was done away with. Instead of seeing that the constitu- 
tional rights for the protection of property had grown up because 
property was wisely used, they asserted that it was none of the 
public's business how they used the property, as long as they kept 
within the letter of the Constitution. 

Of course this arbitrary exercise of power provoked a reaction. 
The state legislatures of the Mississippi Valley passed the various 
Granger laws which were placed on their statute books from 1870 
to 1875.^ These laws represented an attempt to reduce rates as 
unintelligent and crude as had been the attempts of the railroad 
agents to maintain rates. In the conflict of constitutional au- 
thority, the courts on the whole took the side of the legislature 
more than they did that of the railroads ; and the ill-judged laws 
regulating railroad charges, which could not be repealed until 
several years too late, were an important factor in increasing the 
commercial distress that followed the crisis of 1873. 

Just when things were at their worst a really great man ap- 
peared on the scene of action in Charles Francis Adams of the 
Massachusetts Railroad Commission. He promulgated an idea, 
essentially ethical in its character, which not only was of great 
service at the time, but has been the really vital force in all good 
schemes of corporate regulation ever since. It is hardly too 
much to say that all our plans for deaUng with corporate mo- 
nopoly have been successful according to the extent to which 
they conformed to Mr. Adams's idea, and that their ill success in 
various cases has been the result of their departure from it. Mr. 
Adams's central principle was this. In the management of a 

1 State statutes regulating charges for common carriers and other public 
service corporations. — Editors. 



4i8 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY • 

railroad the temporary interests of the road and of its various 
shippers are often divergent ; but the permanent interests of the 
railroad and of the various shippers come very much closer to- 
gether than the temporary ones, and can almost be said to coin- 
cide. A railroad which is managed to make the most profit for 
the moment will try to make very low rates on through business 
that might otherwise go to another line, and will squeeze to the 
utmost the local shippers who have no such refuge. But if a 
manager looks five years or ten years ahead, he will see that such 
a policy kills the local business, which after all must furnish the 
road's best custom, and stimulates a kind of competitive business 
which can and will go somewhere else when the slightest oppor- 
tunity is given. Thie manager who looks to the future, therefore, 
instead of to the present, will put the local business on the same 
level as the through business ; and if he makes any difference at 
all in the charge, it will be due to a slightly superior economy 
of handling large and regular consignments for long distances, as 
compared with the small and irregular consignments of inter- 
mediate points. The agent who simply wants to get the most 
money that he can for the moment will see an apparent advan- 
tage in making a special bargain with each customer. The agent 
who takes a long look ahead will do just what the storekeeper 
does who takes a long look ahead. He will see that the right cus- 
tomer to develop is the self-respecting man who is content with 
the same treatment as other customers ; who is too proud for 
begging and too honest for bribery. 

I cannot go into all the details of the application of this theory. 
Suffice it to say that during the comparatively short time when 
he was at the head of the Massachusetts Commission, Mr. Adams 
did, in fact, persuade the railroad men of his state, and of a great 
many other states, to take this view of the matter ; that by his 
recommendation, made without any authority except the au- 
thority of common sense, he permanently removed more abuses 
in railroad management than all the various state statutes put 
together ; and that the judicial decisions of the years from 1875 
to 1885, when Mr. Adams's influence was dominant, show a con- 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 419 

stantly increased understanding, not only of the principles of rail- 
road economy, but of the principles which make for the perma- 
nent public welfare of shippers and investors alike. 

I have spoken of Mr. Adams's influence as an ethical one. 
The Railroad Commission of Massachusetts, under the original 
bill which established it, had practically no powers except the 
power to report. It was for this reason regarded by many as 
likely to be a totally ineffective body. This absence of specific 
powers was just what Mr. Adams welcomed. It threw the Com- 
mission back on the power of common sense — which does not 
seem as strong as statutory rights to prosecute people and put 
them in prison, but which, in the hands of a man who really 
possesses it, is actually very much stronger. And when commis- 
sions of more recent years, disregarding the experience of Mr. 
Adams, have besought over and over again for an increase of 
their power to make rates, and their power to prosecute offenders, 
and their power to keep the courts from reviewing their acts, I 
am reminded of the minister in the country church, who said, 
''O Lord, we pray for power; O Lord, we pray for power;" 
until an old deacon, unable to contain himself, interrupted, 
"'Taint power you lack, young man; it's idees !" 

In a complex matter like this we are governed by public opin- 
ion. Anything that makes it necessary for a man to get public 
opinion behind a measure of administration or regulation pre- 
vents him from trying unsound experiments, and assures him 
that the things that he carries through will be successful in fact 
and not merely in name. Good sense is needed to create ac- 
quiescence on the part of the courts, and to prevent widespread 
evasion of statutes and ordinances by the business men of the 
community as a body. Any measure which seems to dispense 
with the necessity of its exercise is pretty sure to end in disaster. 

I have gone into the detail of Mr. Adams's work for the sake 
of this ethical lesson which it inculcates. We have passed be- 
yond the conditions of Mr. Adams's time. National regulation 
has taken the place of state regulation of railroads. Other forms 
of corporate activity have organized into monopolies perhaps 



420 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

more widespread and powerful than any railroad monopoly 
ever was. The relations of corporations to their employees, and 
the mutual duties of organizations of capital and labor toward 
the public in making continuous public service possible, have be- 
come vastly more complex than they were thirty years ago. But 
the essential fact still remains that the problem can be settled 
only by the exercise of common sense and a certain amount of 
unselfishness. Any law which seeks to render these qualities 
unnecessary or superfluous is foredoomed to failure. Any citizen 
who lets these qualities fall into abeyance falls short of a proper 
conception of public duty. The larger his position of influence 
in the industrial world, the greater is the responsibility upon him 
to bring these qualities into use in the conduct of corporate 
business. 

The president of a large corporation is in a place of public 
trust. In an obvious sense he is a trustee for the stockholders 
and creditors of his corporation. In a less obvious but equally 
important sense he is a trustee on behalf of the public. 

In regard to the first of these points, the community has made 
substantial and gratifying progress toward proper moral stand- 
ards and their enforcement. It will perhaps create surprise 
that I say this so unreservedly, when we have the results of the 
insurance scandals freshly in mind.^ But bad as these things were, 
they were not nearly so bad as many things that happened a 
generation earlier ; and when the insurance scandals became 
known, they created an outburst of public feeling of a very differ- 
ent kind from anything which would have developed forty years 
ago. The spontaneous and overwhelming character of this out- 
burst shows a great moral advance. In the year 1870 it was the 
commonest thing in the world for the president of a large corpo- 
ration to use his position as a means of enriching himself and his 
friends at the expense of the stockholders in general ; and it 
might almost be added that it was the rarest thing in the world 

1 The insurance scandals exposed by the New York Legislative Investi- 
gating Committee in 1905, chiefly involving the Equitable, Mutual, and 
New York Life companies. — Editors. 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 421 

for anybody to object. The fact that Cornelius Vanderbilt ad- 
mitted his stockholders to the benefit of profitable "deals," instead 
of taking the whole for himself and his friends, was a sufficient 
departure from the usage of the time to excite universal remark. 
The worst things which were done in our insurance companies 
represent a pious regard for the law and a scrupulous observance 
of the principles of morality, as compared with some of the trans- 
actions in Erie in the early seventies. Ten years later things had 
improved. It was no longer considered proper for a president to 
wreck his company in order to enrich himself. Yet even in this 
decade it was held that minorities of stockholders had no rights 
which majorities were bound to respect; and while the public 
did not justify the president in getting rich at the expense of his 
stockholders, it saw no harm if he used his inside information to 
get rich at the expense of anybody and everybody else. It is 
greatly to the credit of some of our best railroad men that in the 
last decade of the nineteenth century we rose above this state of 
things. The example of a recent president of the Lake Shore 
Railroad, who died a relatively poor man when the stock of his 
corporation stood higher than that of almost any other railroad 
in the country, is a thing which deserves to be remembered — 
and which has been. 

Banks and railroads were the two lines of business where cor- 
porate scandals first developed on a large scale. They are now 
the two lines of business where standards of corporate honor, 
beyond what the law could enforce, have become pretty well es- 
tablished. This is no mere coincidence. Corporate powers gave 
opportunities for abuse which did not exist before. Where these 
powers were greatest, these abuses developed first and made the 
earliest public scandals. It was here that the business men them- 
selves felt the need of remedies deeper reaching than those which 
the law could give. Combinations of merchants or manufac- 
turers or of financiers outside the regular lines of banking were a 
later thing, and therefore we are only at this moment correcting 
the evils which are incident to their conduct. 

It takes a long time for a man to learn to transfer a principle 



422 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

of morality which he fully recognizes in one field to another field 
of slightly different location and character, particularly if the 
application of strict morality in the new field is going to hurt his 
personal interest. I remember a story of a country court in a 
warranty case which furnishes an instance in point. One man 
had sold another a cow, and had represented that cow as pos- 
sessing certain good qualities — adding, however, that he did 
not warrant her. The cow proved not to possess the qualities 
alleged, and the buyer sought to recover the purchase money. 
As there was no dispute about the facts, the plaintiff's attorney 
thought that he had an easy case; for it is a well-established 
principle of law that a disclaimer of warranty in such a sale does 
not protect the transaction from the taint of fraud, if the matters 
in question were ones which the seller really could know and the 
buyer could not. He showed a sufficient number of legal prece- 
dents to illustrate this principle, but was somewhat dumfounded 
when the opposing lawyer rose and said: "May it please the 
court, every one of the cases cited by my learned brother is a 
horse case. I defy him to produce one relating to horned cattle." 
The court was impressed with this fact, and instructed the jury 
to the effect that it had been established from time immemorial 
that a disclaimer of warranty was invalid with regard to a horse, 
but that the case of a cow was something totally different. We 
witnessed a somewhat similar condition in recent years, when 
men who would have recognized that it was wrong to get rich 
at the expense of a stockholder, who had clear and definite rights 
to dividends that were earned, were perfectly willing to use all 
kinds of means to enrich themselves at the expense of the policy- 
holders, whose rights were vague and indefinite. The lesson of 
last year was a terrible one ; but I believe that it has been thor- 
oughly learned. The business community of to-day recognizes 
that the president and directors of a corporation have a fiduciary 
relation both to their stockholders and to their creditors ; that 
any man who disregards this relation is guilty of breach of trust, 
just as much as he would be if he used his position as guardian of 
an orphan to enrich himself at the expense of his ward. If any 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 423 

man does not see this, the business community despises his intel- 
lect. If he does see this and acts in disregard of it, the business 
community despises his character. 

Unfortunately the obligation of the managers of our corpora- 
tions to the public is not yet as clearly recognized as their obliga- 
tion to the stockholders. Some of those who are most scrupulous 
about doing all that they can for the stockholders make this an 
excuse for doing as little as they can for the public in general, and 
disclaim indignantly the existence of any wider trust or any out- 
side duty which should interfere with the performance of their 
primary trust to the last penny. There is many a man who in 
the conduct of his own life, and even of his own personal business, 
is scrupulously regardful of public opinion, but who, as the presi- 
dent of a corporation, disregards that opinion rather ostenta- 
tiously. Personally he is sensitive to public condemnation ; but 
as a trustee he honestly believes that he has no right to indulge 
any such sensitiveness. He is unselfish in the one case, and 
selfish in the other. I believe that this results from an extremely 
shortsighted view of the matter ; and that the conscientious ful- 
fillment of wider obligations, which he assumes as a matter of 
course when his own money is at stake, is at once wise policy and 
sound morality when he is acting as trustee for the money and 
interests of others. 

Even from the narrowest standpoint of pecuniary interest, the 
duty of the corporate president to the investors demands that he 
should by his life and his language strive to diminish the danger 
of legal spoliation which threatens property rights in general and 
the rights of corporate property in particular. This obligation is 
partly recognized, and partly not. Our leaders of industry, as a 
rule, do not spend great sums on ostentatious luxury, and do 
spend great sums on objects of public benefit. Both of these 
facts are invaluable conservative forces. On the other hand, too 
many of them insist publicly on an extreme view of their legal 
rights and claims, which cannot help irritating their opponents, 
and which does a great deal more harm to the interests of prop- 
erty than most people think. It was the arrogance of the 



424 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

freight agents, quite as much as the mistakes in their schedule of 
charges, that precipitated the Granger agitation. They defi- 
antly refused to recognize the shipper's point of view. Every 
such defiance by the head of a large corporation makes more con- 
verts to radicalism and socialism than the speaker ever dreams. 
If a man intends to stand on his legal rights, it is generally wise 
for him to keep as quiet as the circumstances admit. The cases 
are few and far between where a loud statement in advance that 
he is going to stand on his legal rights, and that those rights in 
his judgment are consonant with the laws of God, produces any- 
thing but an adverse effect on his interests and on the interests of 
those whom he represents. It is not for the profit of the year's 
balance sheet that the corporate president should regard himself 
as responsible, but for the profit in the long run ; and that profit 
in the long run is identified with the maintenance of a conserva- 
tive spirit and the avoidance of unnecessary conflicts between 
those who have and those who have not. 

The duty of the corporate president to the investors also de- 
mands that he use all wise means for the maintenance of continu- 
ous public service. The more complete the monopoly which he 
has, and the more vital the public necessity which he provides, 
the greater is the importance of this aspect of his trust for the 
permanence of the interests which he represents. For if the 
employer is indifferent to the public need in this regard, the em- 
ployees will be still more indifferent. If he tries to make public 
necessity a means to reenforce his demands, they will make that 
public necessity a means to reenforce their demands ; and in this 
contest the employees will have every advantage on their side. 
Each conflict of this kind will increase the demand for public 
regulation of corporate affairs, even if the interests of the inves- 
tors suffer thereby ; and it may reach a point where many lines 
of business will be taken out of the hands of private corporations 
and into the hands of the government. 

In the old days, when the public was served by a number of in- 
dependent establishments, a strike was a grave matter for the 
establishment where it existed and a comparatively small thing 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 425 

for anybody else. The public got its goods from some other 
quarter. The slight shortage in the supply might raise the 
prices a little, but it did not produce a famine. The community 
as a whole could wait complacently for the fight to be settled. 
If, however, the company has a monopoly, the conditions are 
reversed. The strike, if protracted, causes great inconvenience 
and generally considerable suffering to the public, while the 
effect on the finances of the corporation is often comparatively 
slight. Indeed, it has become a proverb that strikes are not as a 
rule good reasons for sale of the securities of the companies 
affected. I am afraid that this fact makes the presidents of our 
corporations, especially those who hold a narrow view of their 
duties, more careless than they otherwise would be about men 
whom they choose for positions of superintendence, and about 
the policy which they adopt in early stages of labor disputes. 
But it is upon care in these particulars, rather than upon any 
machinery for compulsory arbitration, that we must rely for the 
prevention of strikes. I suppose that sometime we shall devise 
systems of arbitration which will avoid a large number of our in- 
dustrial quarrels ; but those that I have actually seen in opera- 
tion do not appear very promising. We are told that compulsory 
arbitration has been made to work in New Zealand ; but some 
of the official information which we get from New Zealand has 
been so totally discredited that we must be a little cautious about 
accepting any of the testimony which is transmitted to us. Nor 
do I believe very greatly in the efficiency of profit-sharing sys- 
tems as a general means of preventing labor troubles. Some- 
times they work well ; oftener they do not. Plans for attaching 
the laborers to the corporate service by pension funds, by the 
distribution of stock, and other means of this kind, are perhaps 
rather more promising. Yet even these are limited in their 
applicability, and sometimes cause more unrest than they pre- 
vent. 

For the present, it is not to any machinery that we must look 
for the solution of these difficulties. It is to a wider sense of 
responsibility on the part of directors and general ofl&cers. The 



426 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

man who selects his subordinates solely for their fitness in mak- 
ing the results of the year's accounts look best, and instructs 
them to work for these results at the sacrifice of all other inter- 
ests, encourages the employees to work for themselves in defiance 
of the needs either of the corporation or of the public, and does 
more than almost any professional agitator to foster the spirit 
which makes labor organizations unreasonable in their demands 
and defiant in their attitude. For the laborers, like some of 
the rest of us, are a good deal more affected by feeling than by 
reason ; a good deal more influenced by examples than by syl- 
logisms. 

When I was connected with the Railroad Gazette, we had occa- 
sion to discuss a strike on the part of one of the best of the labor 
unions, in which, contrary to the usual practice of that organiza- 
tion, the demands were quite unreasonable. There was some- 
thing puzzling in the whole situation, which I could not account 
for. A close observer who, though he was on the side of the 
corporation, had sense enough to look at the facts dispassionately, 
said, "Do you know Blank ?" naming a man high in the operat- 
ing department of the road concerned. I said that L did. 
" Blank," he said, " is an honest man. He is, according to all his 
lights, an honorable man. And yet if Blank were placed over me, 
I would strike on any pretext, good or bad, just to show how I 
hated his ways of doing business. This strike is, of course, an 
unjustifiable one. For the sake of all concerned it should be 
stopped as soon as possible, and your paper should say so. But 
when the strike is over, sail into the road with all your might for 
employing a man like Blank in a position precisely the opposite 
of anything for which Providence designed him." It soon be- 
came evident that this was a true account of the origin of the 
strike. The company saw the situation and transferred the 
man, on its own account, to another post for which he was more 
fitted. 

Workmen are accessible to examples of loyalty, as well as 
examples of selfishness. One of our very large manufacturing 
concerns in western Pennsylvania a few years ago made a change 



I 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 427 

in its operating head. Not many months after the change I had 
the opportunity to inquire of a foreman how things were work- 
ing under the new management. "Sir," was the reply, "there 
isn't a man in the works but what would go straight through hell 
with the new boss if he wanted it." I told the "new boss" the 
story ; and all he said was, "I guess they know that I'd do the 
same for them." That was the voice of a man — an exceptional 
man; but what he really accomplished represents a kind of 
result which all of us will do well to keep in view. 

In the great railroad strikes of 1877, when the Brotherhood of 
Locomotive Engineers, — at that time a far less conservatively 
managed organization than it has since become, — intoxicated 
with its successes in the South, ordered a general tie-up of New 
England, the men of the New York & New England Railroad 
met the order with a flat refusal. They had no other reason, 
and they gave no other reason, than their loyalty to a man who 
was at that time a superintendent of no particular reputation or 
influence outside of his own immediate sphere of duty, — 
Charles P. Clark, who afterward became president of the road. 
That one man by his personality not only prevented a general 
strike throughout New England, but by that act restored the 
balance of industrial force in the United States at a time when it 
was more seriously threatened than it ever has been before or 
since. 

A few years later, when a strike on the Union Pacific Railroad 
was scheduled by the Knights of Labor, the president of that 
road prevented the strike by the simple expedient of so arranging 
matters that the responsibility for the interruption of public 
service would at each stage of the proceedings be clearly put upon 
the labor leaders themselves. If the company had been simply 
claiming the right to serve itself, they would have claimed an 
equal right to serve themselves, and might very possibly have 
had the sympathy of the public behind them. But when matters 
were so arranged in advance that the responsibility for the inter- 
ruption rested upon their shoulders alone, even the Knights of 
Labor — and Western Knights of Labor at that — shrank from 



428 ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

taking the responsibility of a conflict with the nation. Of course 
strikes will continue to occur after all precautions are taken. 
They may come to the man or the company that least deserves it. 
But we can impress upon the managers of corporations the duty 
of showing more solicitude for the protection of the public 
against the disastrous results of the strike when it does come, and 
the unwisdom of saying much about the sacredness of the rights 
of private property under the Constitution at a time when such 
words can only irritate the employees and alienate the suffering 
public. 

There is, indeed, a sacredness of property right in this country 
which goes far beyond the letter of the Constitution. The Con- 
stitution guarantees that no man shall be deprived of his prop- 
erty without due process of law ; that no state shall pass any 
law impairing the obligation of contract ; and that a corporation 
has the right of a person in the sense of being entitled to fair 
and equal treatment. The conservatism of the American people 
goes farther than this. It supports a business man in the exer- 
cise of his traditional rights, because it believes, on the basis of 
the experience of centuries, that the exercise of these rights will 
conduce to the public interests. It puts the large industries of 
the country in the hands of corporations, even when this results 
in creating corporate monopoly, because it distrusts the unre- 
stricted extension of government activity, and believes that busi- 
ness is on the whole better handled by commercial agencies than 
by political ones. But every case of failure to meet public needs 
somewhat shakes the public in this confidence ; and this confi- 
dence is not only shaken but destroyed if the manager of a cor- 
poration claims immunity from interference as a moral or con- 
stitutional right, independent of the public interests involved. 

Personally, I am one of those who look with serious distrust on 
each extension of political activity. I believe that the inter- 
state commerce law ^ did more to prevent wise railroad regulation 
than any other event in the history of the country. I think 

1 A federal act for the regulation of railroad rates, passed in 1887. — 
Editors. 



ETHICS OF CORPORATE MANAGEMENT 



429 



that the courts would have dealt with our industrial problems 
better than they have done if the antitrust act ^ had never been 
passed. I have gravely doubted the wisdom of some of the 
more recent measures passed by the national government. But 
I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that these things are what 
business men must expect unless business ethics is somewhat 
modified to meet existing conditions. Industrial corporations 
grew up into power because they met the needs of the past. 
To stay in power, they must meet the needs of the present, and 
arrange their ethics accordingly. If they can do it by their own 
voluntary development of the sense of trusteeship, that is the 
simplest and best solution. But if not, one of two things will 
happen : vastly increased legal regulation, or state ownership 
of monopolies. Those who fear the effects of increased govern- 
ment activity must prove by their acceptance of ethical duties 
to the public that they are not blind devotees of an industrial 
past which has ceased to exist, but are preparing to accept the 
heavier burdens and obligations which the industrial present 
carries with it. 

1 Passed by Congress in 1890 " to protect trade and commerce against 
unlawful restraints and monopolies." — Editors. 



XV 

THE LABOR QUESTION FROM THE 
SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 

William Morris 

[William Morris (i 834-1 896) as a man of letters was distinguished for his 
interest in the revival of medieval romanticism. In his pubUc life he was 
probably still more widely known as a sympathetic and practical philanthro- 
pist, and a remarkably gifted designer, craftsman, and printer of exquisite 
books. His social views embrace the belief that much of the sordidness 
and misery occasioned by our modern industrial system msLy be ehminated 
by a benevolent sociaHsm, and that the gradual return of simpler conditions 
of life and a more sincere attitude toward the question of class relationships 
will revive in man a dignified personal interest in the labor of his hands. In 
this connection he defines his conception of art : " The thing which I un- 
derstand by real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labor. I 
do not believe he can be happy in his labor without expressing that hap- 
piness." It is a point of importance that his interest in sociahstic theories 
was the outgrowth of his study of medieval art, and of the social condi- 
tions which produced it. Morris stands with John Ruskin not as a skilled 
economic theorist, but as the exponent of a generous and enlightened hu- 
manitarianism. 

The Labor Question from the Socialist Standpoint, which is one of Morris's 
numerous addresses on socialistic topics, was delivered as a lecture in Scot- 
land in 1886, and was printed in Edinburgh as a penny pamphlet in the same 
year. The lecture is a criticism of the oppressive tendencies of modern com- 
mercialism, and not an attempt to formulate a program of amelioration.] 

I HAVE been asked to give you the socialist view on the la- 
bor question. Now, in some ways that is a difficult matter to 
deal with — far beyond my individual capacities — and would 
also be a long business ; yet in another way, as a matter of prin- 
ciple, it is not difficult to understand or long to tell of, and it 
does not need previous study or acquaintance with the works 

430 



I 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 431 

of specialists or philosophers. Indeed, if it did, it would not 
be a political subject, and I hope to show you that it is preemi- 
nently political in the sense in which I should use the word ; that 
is to say, that it is a matter which concerns every one, and has 
to do with the practical everyday relations of his life, and that 
not only as an individual, but as a member of a body corporate, 
nay, as a member of that great corporation — humanity. Thus 
considered, it would be hard indeed if it could not be understood 
readily by a person of ordinary intelligence who can bring his 
mind to bear upon prejudice. Such a person can learn the basis 
of the opinion in even an hour's talk, if the matter be clearly 
put before him : it is my task to attempt this ; and whether I 
fail or succeed, I can at least promise you to use no technical 
phrases which would require explanation ; nor will I, as far as 
I can help, go into any speculative matter, but will be as plain 
and practical as I can be. 

Yet I must warn you that you may be disappointed when you 
find that I have no elaborate plan, no details of a new society to 
lay before you, that to my mind to attempt this would be put- 
ting before you a mere delusion. What I ask you to consider 
is in the main the clearing away of certain obstacles that stand 
in the way of the due and unwasteful use of labor — a task not 
light, indeed, nor to be accomplished without the most strenu- 
ous effort in the teeth of violent resistance, but yet not impos- 
sible for humanity as we know it, and, as I firmly believe, not 
only necessary, but as things now are, the one thing essential to 
be undertaken. 

Now, you all know that, taking mankind as a whole, it is 
necessary for man to labor in order to live. Certainly not all 
things that we enjoy are the works of man's labor ; the beauty 
of the earth, and the action of nature on our sensations, are 
always here for us to enjoy, but we can only do so on the terms 
of our keeping ourselves alive and in good case by means of 
labor, and no inventions can set aside that necessity. The 
merest savage has to pluck the berry from the tree, or dig up 
the root from the ground before he can enjoy his dog-like sleep 



432 WILLIAM MORRIS 

in sun or shade; and there are no savages who have not got 
beyond that stage, while the progressive races of mankind have 
for many ages got a very long way beyond it, so that we have no 
record of any time when they had not formed some sort of society, 
whose aim was to make the struggle with nature for subsistence 
less hard than it otherwise would have been, to win a more 
abundant livelihood from her. 

We cannot deal at any length with the historical development 
of society ; our object is simply to inquire into the constitution 
of that final development of society under which we live. But 
one may first ask a few questions : first, since the community 
generally must labor in order that the individuals composing it 
may subsist, and labor harder in order that they may attain 
further advantages, ought not a really successful community so 
to arrange that labor that each capable person should do a fair 
share of it and no more ? Second, should not a really successful 
community — established surely for the benefit of all its mem- 
bers — arrange that every one who did his due share of labor 
should have his due share of the wealth earned by that labor ? 
Third, if any labor was wasted, such waste would throw an 
additional burden on those who produced what was necessary 
and pleasant to existence. Should not a successful community, 
therefore, so organize its labor that it should not be wasted? 
You must surely answer "Yes" to each of these three questions. 
I will assert, then, that a successful society — a society which 
fulfilled its true functions — would take care that each did his 
due share of labor, that each had his due share of wealth result- 
ing from that labor, and that the labor of persons generally was 
not wasted. I ask you to remember those three essentials of a 
successful society throughout all that follows, and now to let me 
apply them as a test of success to that society in which we live, 
the latest development of so many ages of the struggle with 
nature, our elaborate and highly organized civilization. 

In our society, does each capable person do his fair share of 
labor ? Is his share of the wealth produced proportionate to his 
labor ? Is the waste of labor avoided in our society ? 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 433 

You may, perhaps, hesitate in your answer to the third ques- 
tion ; you cannot hesitate to say "No " to the two first. I think, 
however, I shall be able to show you that much labor is wasted, 
and that, therefore, our society fails in the three essentials neces- 
sary for a successful society. Our civilization, therefore, though 
elaborate and highly organized, is a failure ; that is, supposing 
it to be the final development of society, as some people, nay, 
most people, suppose it to be. 

Now a few words as to the course of events which have 
brought us to the society of the present day. In periods almost 
before the dawn of continuous history, the early progressive 
races from which we are descended were divided into clans or 
families, who held their wealth, such as it was, in common within 
the clan, while all outside the clan was hostile, and wealth not 
belonging to the clan was looked upon as prize of war. There 
was consequently continual fighting of clan with clan, and at 
first all enemies taken in war were slain ; but after a while, as 
man progressed and got defter with his hands, and learned how 
to make more effective tools, it began to be found out that, so 
working, each man could do more than merely sustain himself ; 
and then some of the prisoners of war, instead of being slain on 
the field, were made slaves of; they had become valuable for 
work, like horses. Out of the wealth they produced their mas- 
ters or owners gave them sustenance enough to live on and took 
the rest for themselves. Time passed, and the complexity of 
society grew, the early barbarism passed through many stages 
into the ancient civilizations, of which Greece and Rome were 
the great representatives ; but this civilization was still founded 
on slave labor ; most of its wealth was created by men who 
could be sold in the market like cattle. But as the old civili- 
zations began to decay, this slave labor became unprofitable ; 
the countries comprised in the Roman Empire were disturbed 
by constant war ; the governments, both central and provincial, 
became mere taxgathering machines, and grew so greedy that 
things became unbearable. Society became a mere pretext for 
taxgathering, and fell to pieces, and chattel slavery fell with it. 



434 WILLIAM MORRIS 

since under all these circumstances slaves were no longer valu- 
able. 

Then came another change. A new society was formed, partly 
out of the tribes of barbarians who had invaded the Roman Em- 
pire, and partly out of the fragments of that Empire itself ; the 
feudal system arose, bearing with it new ideas, which I have 
not time to deal with here and now. Suffice it to say, that in 
its early days mere chattel slavery gave place to serfdom. Power- 
ful men, privileged men, had not forgotten that men can produce 
more by a day's labor than mil keep them alive for a day ; so 
now they settled their laborers on certain portions of land, 
stocked their land with them, in fact, and on these lands they 
had leave to live as well as they might on the condition that they 
should work a certain part of their time on the land which be- 
longed to their lords. The average condition of these serfs was 
better than that of the chattel slaves. They could not be 
bought and sold personally, they were a part of the manor on 
which they lived, and they had as a class a tendency to become 
tenants by various processes. In one way or another these serfs 
got gradually emancipated, and during a transitional period, last- 
ing through the two last centuries of the Middle Ages, the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries, the labor classes were in a far 
better position than they had been before, and in some ways 
than they have been since, suffering more from spasmodic arbi- 
trary violence than from chronic legal oppression. The tran- 
sition from this period to our own days is one of the most in- 
teresting chapters of history; but it is impossible for me to 
touch on it here. All I can say is, that the emancipated serfs 
formed one of the elements that went to make up our present 
middle class, and that a new class of workers grew up beneath 
them — men who were not owned by any one, who were bound 
by no legal ties to such and such a manor, who might earn what 
livelihood they could for themselves under certain conditions, 
which I will presently try to lay before you, and which are most 
important to be considered, for this new class of so-called free 
laborers has become our modern working class. 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 435 

Now it will be clear to you, surely, how much and how griev- 
ously both the classical period, with its chattel slavery, and the 
feudal system, with its serfdom, fell short of the society which 
we have set before us as reasonably successful. In each of them 
there was a class obviously freed from the necessity of labor, by 
means of the degradation of another class which labored exces- 
sively and reaped but a small reward for its excessive labor. 
Surely there was something radically wrong in these two societies. 
From the fact that labor is necessary for man's life on the earth, 
and that nature yields her abundance to labor only, one would 
be inclined to deduce the probability that he who worked most 
would be the best off ; but in these slave and serf societies the 
reverse was the case : the man of leisureless toil lived miserably, 
the man who did nothing useful lived abundantly. Then, again, 
as to our third test, was there no waste of labor ? Yes, indeed, 
there was waste most grievous. I have said that the slave owner 
or the lord of the manor did nothing useful, and yet he did some- 
thing — he was bound to do something, for he was often ener- 
getic, gifted, and full of character — he made war ceaselessly, 
consuming thereby the wealth which his slaves or his serfs 
created, and forcing them to work the more grievously. Here 
was waste enough, and lack of organization of labor. 

Well, all this people found no great difficulty in seeing, and 
few would like, publicly at least, to confess a regret for these 
conditions of labor, although in private some men, less hypo- 
critical or more logical than the bulk of reactionists, admit that 
they consider the society of cultivated men and chattel slaves the 
best possible for weak human nature. Yet though we can see 
what has been, we cannot so easily see what is ; and I admit 
that it is especially hard for people in our civilization, with its 
general freedom from the ruder forms of violence, its orderly 
routine life, and, in short, all that tremendous organization whose 
very perfection of continuity prevents us from noticing it, — I 
say it is hard for people under the quiet order and external sta- 
bility of modern society to note that much the same thing is 
going on in the relations of employers to the employed, as went 



436 WILLIAM MORRIS 

on under the slave society of Athens, or under the serf-sustained 
baronage of the thirteenth century. 

For I assert that with us, as with the older societies, those who 
work hardest fare the worst, those who produce the least get 
the most ; while as to the waste of labor that goes on, the waste 
of times past is as nothing compared with what is wasted 
to-day. 

I must now justify this view of mine, and if possible get you 
to agree with it, by pointing out to you how society at the pres- 
ent day is constituted. 

Now, as always, there are only two things essential to the 
production of wealth — labor and raw material ; every one can 
labor who is not sick or in nonage ; therefore every one, except 
those, if he can get at raw material, can produce wealth; but 
without that raw material he cannot produce anything — any- 
thing, that is, that man can live upon ; and if he does not labor, 
he must live at the expense of those that do ; unless, therefore, 
every one can get at the raw material and instruments of produc- 
tion, the community in general will be burdened by the expense 
of so many useless mouths, and the sum of its wealth will be 
less than it ought to be. But in our civilized society of to-day 
the raw material and the instruments of production are monopo- 
lized by a comparatively small number of persons, who will not 
allow the general population to use them for production of wealth 
unless they pay them tribute for doing so ; and since they are 
able to exact this tribute, they themselves are able to live with- 
out producing, and consequently are a burden on the community. 
Nor are these monopolists content with exacting a bare liveli- 
hood from the producers, as mere vagabonds and petty thieves 
do ; they are able to get from the producers in all cases an abun- 
dant livelihood, including most of the enjoyments and advantages 
of civilization, and in many cases a position of such power that 
they are practically independent of the community, and almost 
out of reach of its laws — although, indeed, the greater part of 
those laws were made for the purpose of upholding this monopoly 
— and wherever necessary they do now use the physical force, 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 437 

which by one means or another they have under their control, 
for such upholding. 

These monopolists, or capitalists, as one may call them broadly 
(for I will not at present distinguish the land capitalists from the 
money capitalists), are in much the same position as the slave 
owners of ancient Greece and Rome, or the serf masters of the 
thirteenth century ; but they have this advantage over them, 
that though really they sustain their position by mere compul- 
sion, just as the earlier masters did, that compulsion is not visible 
as the compulsion of the earlier times was, and it is very much 
their business to prevent it becoming visible, as may be well 
imagined. But as I am against monopoly and in favor of free- 
dom, I must try to get you to see it ; since seeing it is the first 
step towards feeling it, which in its turn is sure to lead to your 
refusing to bear it. 

I have spoken of the tribute which the capitalists exact as the 
price of the use of those means of production which ought to be 
as free to all as the air we breathe is, since they are as necessary 
to our existence as it is. How do they exact the tribute ? They 
are, to start with, in a good position, you see, because, even with- 
out any one's help, they could use the labor power in their own 
bodies on the raw material they have, and so earn their liveli- 
hood ; but they are not content with that, as I hinted above — 
they are not likely to be, because their position, legalized and 
supported by the whole physical force of the state, enables them 
"to do better for themselves," as the phrase goes — they can 
use the labor power of the disinherited, and force them to keep 
them without working for production. Those disinherited, how- 
ever, they must keep alive to labor, and they must allow them 
also opportunity for breeding — these are necessities that pressed 
equally on the ancient slave owner or the medieval lord of the 
manor, or, indeed, on the owner of draft cattle ; they must at 
least do for the workers as much as for a machine, supply them 
with fuel to enable them to work ; nor need they do more if 
they are dealing with men who have no power of resistance. 
But these machines are human ones, instinct with desires and 



438 WILLIAM MORRIS 

passions, and therefore they cannot help trying to better them- 
selves ; and they cannot better themselves except at the expense 
of the masters, because whatever they produce more than the 
bare necessaries of hfe the masters will at once take from them 
if they can ; therefore they have always resisted the full exer- 
cise of the privilege of the masters, and have tried to raise their 
standard of livehhood above the mere subsistence limit. Their 
resistance has taken various forms, from peaceful strikes to open 
war, but it has always been going on, and the masters, when not 
driven into a corner, have often yielded to it, although unwiUingly 
enough; but it must be said that mostly the workers have 
claimed little more than mere slaves would, who might mutiny 
for a bigger ration. For, in fact, this wage paid by our modern 
masters is nothing more than the ration of the slave in another 
form ; and when the masters have paid it, they are free to use 
all the rest that the workers produce, just as the slave owner 
takes all that the slave produces. Remember at this point, 
therefore, that everything more than bare subsistence which the 
workers make to-day, they make by carrying on constant war 
with their masters. I must add that their success in this war 
is often more apparent than real, and too often it means little 
more than shifting the burden of extreme poverty from one 
group of the workers to another; the unskilled laborers, of 
whom the supply is unlimited, do not gain by it, and their num- 
bers have a tendency to increase, as the masters, driven to their 
shifts, use more and more elaborate machines in order to dis- 
pense with the skilled labor, and also use the auxiliary labor of 
women and children, to whom they do not pay subsistence wages, 
thereby keeping down .the wages of the head of the family, and 
depriving him and them of the mutual help and comfort in the 
household, which would otherwise be gained from them. 

Thus, then, the capitalists, by means of their monopoly of the 
means of production, compel the worker to work for less than 
his due share of the wealth which he produces, — that is, for 
less than he produces ; he must work, he will die else, and as they 
are in possession of the raw material, he must agree to the terms 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 439 

they enforce upon him. This is the "free contract " of which we 
hear so much, and which, to speak plainly, is a capitalist lie. 
There is no way out of this freedom save rebellion of some kind 
or other — strike rebellion, which impoverishes the workers for 
the time, whether they win the strike or lose it ; or the rebellion 
of open revolt, which will be put down always, until it is organ- 
ized for a complete change in the basis of society. 

Now to show you another link or two of the chain which binds 
the workers. There is one thing which hampers this constant 
struggle of the workers towards bettering their condition at the 
expense of their masters, and that is competition for livelihood 
amongst them. I have told you that unskilled labor is practi- 
cally unlimited ; and machines, the employment of women and 
children, long hours of work, and all that cheapening of produc- 
tion so much bepraised now, bring about this state of things, 
that even in ordinary years there are more hands than there is 
work to give them. This is the great instrument of compulsion 
of modern monopoly ; people undersell one another in our mod- 
ern slave market, so that the employers have no need to use any 
visible instrument of compulsion in driving them towards work ; 
and the invisibility of this whip — the fear of death by starva- 
tion — has so muddled people's brains, that you may hear men, 
otherwise intelligent, e.g., answering objections to the uselessness 
of some occupation by saying, "But, you see, it gives people 
employment," altliough they would be able to see that if three 
of them had to dig a piece of ground, and one of them knocked 
off, and was "employed" in throwing chuckle stones into the 
water, the other two would have to do his share of the work as 
well as their own. 

Another invisible link of the chain is this, that the workman 
does not really know his own master ; the individual employer 
may be, and often is, on good terms with his men, and really un- 
conscious of the war between them, although he cannot fail to 
know that if he pays more wages to his men than other employers 
in the same line of business as himself do, he will be beaten by 
them. But the workman's real master is not his immediate em- 



440 



WILLIAM MORRIS 



ployer, but his class, which will not allow even the best-inten- 
tioned employer to treat his men otherwise than as profit-grind- 
ing machines. By his profit, made out of the unpaid labor of 
his men, the manufacturer must live, unless he gives up his po- 
sition and learns to work like one of his own men, which, indeed, 
as a rule he could not do, as he has usually not been taught to 
do any useful work ; therefore, as I have said, he must reduce 
his wages to the lowest point he can, since it is on the margin 
between his men's production and their wages that his profit de- 
pends ; his class, therefore, compels him to compel his workmen 
to accept as little as possible. But further, the workman is a 
consumer as well as a producer ; and in that character he has 
not only to pay rent to a landlord (and far heavier proportion- 
ately than rich people have to pay), and also a tribute to the 
middleman who lives without producing and without doing serv- 
ice to the community, by passing money from one pocket to 
another, but he also has to pay (as consumer) the profits of the 
other manufacturers who superintend the production of the 
goods he uses. Again, as a mere member of society, a should-be 
citizen, he has to pay taxes, and a great deal more than he thinks ; 
he has to pay for wars, past, present, and future, that are never 
meant to benefit him, but to force markets for his masters, nay, 
to keep him from rebellion, from taking his own at some date ; 
he has also to pay for the thousand and one idiocies of parlia- 
mentary government, and ridiculous monarchical and official 
state — for the mountain of precedent, nonsense, and chicanery, 
with its set of ofiicials, whose business it is, under the name of 
law, to prevent justice being done to any one. In short, in one 
way or another, when he has by dint of constant labor got his 
wages into his pocket, he has them taken away from him again 
by various occult methods, till it comes to this at last, that he 
really works an hour for one third of an hour's pay ; while the 
two thirds go to those who have not produced the wealth which 
they consume. 

Here, then, as to the first and second conditions of a reason- 
able society : (i) That the labor should be duly apportioned ; 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 441 

(2) that the wealth should be duly apportioned. Our society 
does not merely fail in them, but positively inverts them ; with 
us, those who consume most produce least, those who produce 
most consume least. 

There yet remains something to be said on the third condition 
of a fair-state of society : that it should look to it that labor be 
not wasted. How does civilization fare in this respect ? I have 
told you what was the occupation of the ancient slaveholders, 
set free by slave labor from the necessity of producing — it was 
fighting with each other for the aggrandizement, in earlier times 
of their special city, in later of their own selves; similarly, the 
medieval baron, set free from the necessity of producing by the 
labor of the serfs who tilled his lands for him, occupied himself 
with fighting for more serf-tilled land either for himself or for 
his suzerain. In our own days we see that there is a class freed 
from the necessity of producing by the tribute paid by the wage 
earner. What does our free class do ? how does it occupy the 
lifelong leisure which it forces toil to yield to it ? 

Well, it chiefly occupies itself in war, like those earlier non- 
producing classes, and very busy it is over it. I know, indeed, 
that there is a certain portion of the dominant class that does 
not pretend to do anything at all, except perhaps a little amateur 
reactionary legislation, yet even of that group I have heard that 
some of them are very busy in their estate offices trying to make 
the most of their special privilege, the monopoly of the land; 
and, taking them altogether, they are not a very large class. Of 
the rest some are busy in taxing us and repressing our liberties 
directly, as officers in the army and navy, magistrates, judges, 
barristers, and lawyers ; they are the salaried officers on the part 
of the masters in the great class struggle. Other groups there 
are, as artists and literary men, doctors, schoolmasters, etc., 
who occupy a middle position between the producers and the 
nonproducers ; they are doing useful service, and ought to be 
doing it for the community at large, but practically they are 
only working for a class, and in their present position are little 
better than hangers-on of the nonproducing class from whom 



442 WILLIAM MORRIS 

they receive a share of their privilege, together with a kind of 
contemptuous recognition of their position as gentlemen — 
heaven save the mark ! But the great mass of the nonproduc- 
ing classes are certainly not idle in the ordinary sense of the woM ; 
they could not be, for they include men of great energy and force 
of character, who would, as all reasonable men do, insist on some 
serious or exciting occupation ; and I say once again their occu- 
pation is war, though it is "writ large," and called competition. 
They are, it is true, called organizers of labor ; and sometimes 
they do organize it, but when they do they expect an extra re- 
ward for so doing outside their special privilege. A great many 
of them, though they are engaged in the war, sit at home at 
ease, and let their generals, their salaried managers to wit, wage 
it for them, — I am meaning here shareholders, or sleeping part- 
ners, — but whenever they are active in business they are really 
engaged in organizing the war with their competitors, the capital- 
ists in the same line of business as themselves ; and if they are 
to be successful in that war they must not be sparing of destruc- 
tion, either of their own or of other people's goods ; nay, they 
not unseldom are prepared to further the war of sudden, as op- 
posed to that of Hngering, death, and of late years they have in- 
volved pretty nearly the whole of Europe in attacks on barbarian 
or savage peoples, which are only distinguishable from sheer 
piracy by their being carried on by nations instead of indi- 
viduals. But all that is only by the way ; it is the ordinary and 
necessary outcome of their operations that there should be peri- 
odical slackness of trade following on times of inflation, from the 
fact that every one tries to get as much as he can of the market 
to himself at the expense of every one else, so that sooner or 
later the market is sure to be overstocked, so that wares are sold 
sometimes at less than the cost of production, which means that 
so much labor has been wasted on them by misdirection. Nor 
is that all ; for they are obliged to keep an army of clerks and 
such-like people, who are not necessary either for the produc- 
tion of goods or their distribution, but are employed in safe- 
guarding their master's interests against their master's com- 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 443 

petitors. The waste is further increased by the necessity of 
these organizers of the commercial war for playing on the igno- 
rance and gullibility of the customers by two processes, which in 
their perfection are specialties of the present century, and even, 
it may be said, of this latter half of it — to wit, adulteration and 
puffery. It would be hard to say how much ingenuity and pains- 
taking have been wasted on these incidents in the war of com- 
merce, and I am wholly unable to get any statistics of them; 
but we all know that an enormous amount of labor is spent on 
them, which is at the very best as much wasted as if those en- 
gaged on it were employed in digging a hole and filling it up 
again. 

But, further, there is yet another source of waste involved in 
our present society. The grossly unequal distribution of w-ealth 
forces the rich to get rid of their surplus money by means of 
various forms of folly and luxury, which means further waste of 
labor. Do not think I am advocating asceticism. I wish us 
all to make the utmost of what we can obtain from nature to 
make us happier and more contented while we live ; but, apart 
from reasonable comfort and real refinement, there is, as I am 
sure no one can deny, a vast amount of sham wealth and sham 
service created by our miserable system of rich and poor, which 
makes no human being the happier on the one hand, while on 
the other it withdraws vast numbers of workers from the pro- 
duction of real utihties, and so casts a heavy additional burden 
of labor on those who are producing them. I have been speak- 
ing hitherto of a producing and a nonproducing class, but I 
have been quite conscious all the time that though the first class 
produces whatever wealth is created, a very great many of them, 
are prevented from producing wealth at all, are being set to 
nothing better than turning a wheel that grinds nothing — save 
their own lives. Nay, worse than nothing. I hold that this 
sham wealth is not merely a negative evil (I mean in itself), 
but a positive one. It seems to me that the refined society of 
to-day is distinguished from all others by a kind of gloomy 
cowardice — a stolid but timorous incapacity of enjoyment. 



444 WILLIAM MORRIS 

He who runs may read the record of the unhappy rich not less 
than that of the unhappy poor, in the futihty of their amuse- 
ments and the degradation of their art and Hterature. 

Well, then, the third condition of a reasonable society is vio- 
lated by our present so-called society ; the tremendous Activity, 
energy, and invention of modern times is to a great extent 
wasted; the monopolists force the workers to waste a great 
part of their labor power, while they waste almost the whole of 
theirs. Our society, therefore, does not fulfill the true functions 
of society. Now, the constitution of all society requires that 
each individual member of it should yield up a part of his liberty 
in return for the advantages of mutual help and defense; yet 
at bottom that surrender should be part of the liberty itself; 
it should be voluntary in essence. But if society does not fulfill 
its duties towards the individual, it wrongs him; and no man 
voluntarily submits to wrong — nay, no man ought to. The 
society, therefore, that has violated the essential conditions of 
its existence must be sustained by mere brute force; and that 
is the case of our modern society, no less than that of the ancient 
slaveholding and the medieval serf-holding societies. As a 
practical deduction, I ask you to agree with me that such a 
society should be changed from its base up, if it be possible. 
And, further, I must ask how, by what, and by whom, such a 
revolution can be accomplished? But before I set myself to 
deal with these questions, I will ask you to believe that, though 
I have tried to argue the matter on first principles, I do not ap- 
proach the subject from a pedantic point of view. If I could 
believe that, however wrong it may be in theory, our present 
system works well in practice, I should be silenced. If I thought 
that its wrongs and anomalies were so capable of palliation, that 
people generally were not only contented but were capable of 
developing their human faculties duly under it, and that we were 
on the road to progress without a great change, I for one would 
not ask any one to meddle with it. But I do not believe that, 
nor do I know of any thoughtful person that does. In thought- 
ful persons I can see but two attitudes; on the one hand the 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 445 

despair of pessimism, which I admit is common, and on the 
other a desire and hope of change. Indeed, in a year Hke the 
present, when one hears on all sides and from all classes of what 
people call glepression of trade, which, as we too well know, 
means misery at least as great as that which a big war bears 
with it ; and when on all sides there is ominous grumbling of 
the coming storm, the workers unable to bear the extra burden 
laid upon them by the "bad times," — in such a year there is, 
I do not say no hope, but at least no hope except in those changes, 
the tokens of which are all around us. 

Therefore, again I ask how, or by what, or by whom, the 
necessary revolution can be brought about ? What I have been 
saying hitherto has been intended to show you that there has 
always been a great class struggle going on, which is still sus- 
tained by our class of monopoly and our class of disinheritance. 
It is true that in former times no sooner was one form of that 
class struggle over than another took its place ; but in our days 
it has become much simplified, and has cleared itself by progress 
through its various stages of mere accidental circumstances. 
The struggle for political equality has come to an end, or nearly 
so ; all men are (by a fiction, it is true) declared to be equal 
before the law, and compulsion to labor for another's benefit has 
taken the simple form of the power of the possessor of money, 
who is all-powerful ; therefore if, as we socialists believe, it is 
certain that the class struggle must one day come to an end, we 
are so much nearer to that end by the passing through of some 
of its necessary stages ; history never returns on itself. 

Now, you must not suppose, therefore, that the revolutionary 
struggle of to-day, though it may be accompanied (and neces- 
sarily) by violent insurrection, is paralleled by the insurrections 
of past times. A rising of the slaves of the ancient period, or 
of the serfs of the medieval times, could not have been perma- 
nently successful, because the time was not ripe for such success, 
because the growth of the new order of things was not sufficiently 
developed. It is indeed a terrible thought that, although the 
burden of injustice and suffering was almost too heavy to be 



446 WILLIAM MORRIS 

borne in such insurrectionary times, and although all popular 
uprisings have right on their side, they could not be successful 
at the time, because there was nothing to put in the place of the 
unjust system against which men were revolting. And yet it is 
true, and it explains the fact that the class antagonism is generally 
more felt when the oppressed class is bettering its condition than 
when it is at its worst. The consciousness of oppression then 
takes the form of hope, and leads to action, and is, indeed, the 
token of the gradual formation of a new order of things under- 
neath the old decaying order. 

Most thoughtful people are conscious of the fact that the ten- 
dency of the times is to make the labor classes the great power 
of the epoch, in the teeth of the other fact that labor is at least 
as directly under the domination of a privileged class as ever it 
was. Now these two facts taken together : the obvious uprising 
of the workers in the scale, and their being face to face with a 
class that lives by exploiting their labor, — these two facts seem 
to us socialists to show that one of these classes must give way, 
and that this giving way must mean that one of those classes 
must be absorbed in the other, and so the class war be ended. 
If that position be accepted, it is clear that the class that must 
come alive out of the struggle must be the producing class, the 
useful class ; therefore the socialist's view of the labor question 
is that a new society is in course of development from the work- 
ing classes — the producing classes, more properly — and that 
the other classes which now live on their labor will melt into 
that class. The result of that will be, that, so far as society has 
any conscious organization, it will be an instrument for the ar- 
rangement of labor so as to produce wealth from natural ma- 
terial, and to distribute the wealth when produced without waste 
of labor ; that is to say, it will satisfy those ideal conditions of 
its reason for existence which I began by putting before you. 

I told you that I was not prepared to give you any details of 
the arrangement of a new state of society; but I am prepared 
to state the principles on which it would be founded, and the 
recognition of which would make it easy for serious men to deal 



I 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 447 

with the details of arrangement. Socialism asserts that every 
one should have free access to the means of production of wealth 
— the raw material and the stored-up force produced by labor ; 
in other word§, the land, plant, and stock of the community, 
which are now monopohzed by certain privileged persons, who 
force others to pay for their use. This claim is founded on the 
principle which lies at the bottom of socialism, that the right 
to the possession of wealth is conferred by the possessor having 
worked towards its production, and being able to use it for the 
satisfaction of his personal needs. The recognition of this right 
will be enough to guard against mere confusion and violence. 
The claim to property on any other grounds must lead to what is 
in plain terms robbery ; which will be no less robbery because it 
is organized by a sham society, and must be no less supported 
by violence because it is carried on under the sanction of the law. 

Let me put this with somewhat more of detail. No man has 
made the land of the country, nor can he use more than a small 
portion of it for his personal needs ; no man has made more than 
a small portion of its fertility, nor can use personally more than 
a small part of the results of the labor of countless persons, liv- 
ing and dead, which has gone to produce that fertility. No man 
can build a factory with his own hands, or make the machinery 
in it, nor can he use it, except in combination with others. He 
may call it his, but he cannot make any use of it as his alone, 
unless he is able to compel other people to use it for his benefit ; 
this he does not do personally, but our sham society has so or- 
ganized itself that by its means he can compel this unpaid service 
from others. The magistrate, the judge, the policeman, and 
the soldier, are the sword and pistol of this modern highwayman, 
and I may add that he is also furnished with what he can use as a 
mask under the name of morals and religion. 

Now, if these means of production — the land, plant, and 
stock — were really used for their primary uses, and not as 
means for extracting unpaid labor from others, they would be 
used by men working in combination with each other, each of 
whom would receive his due share of the results of that combined 



448 WILLIAM MORRIS 

labor ; the only difficulty would then be what would be his due 
share, because it must be admitted on all hands that it is impos- 
sible to know how much each individual has contributed towards 
the production of a piece of cooperative labor; but the prin- 
ciple once granted that each man should have his due share of 
what he has created by his labor, the solution of the difficulty 
would be attempted, nay, is now hypothetically attempted, in 
various ways, in two ways mainly. One view is that the state — • 
that is, society organized for the production and distribution of 
wealth — would hold all the means of the production of wealth 
in its hands, allowing the use of them to whomsoever it thought 
could use them, charging rent, perhaps, for their use, but which 
rent would be used again only for the benefit of the whole com- 
munity, and therefore would return to the worker in another 
form. It would also take on itself the organization of labor in 
detail, arranging the how, when, and where, for the benefit of the 
public, — doing all this, one must hope, with as little centrali- 
zation as possible ; in short, the state, according to this view, 
would be the only employer of labor. No individual would be 
able to employ a workman to work for him at a profit, i.e., to work 
for less than the value of his labor (roughly estimated), because 
the state would pay him the full value of it ; nor could any man 
let land or machinery at a profit, because the state would let it 
without the profit. It is clear that if this could be carried out, 
no one could live without working. When a man had spent the 
wealth he had earned personally, he would have to work for more, 
as there would be no tribute coming to him from the labor of past 
generations ; on these terms he could not accumulate wealth, nor 
would he desire to, for he could do nothing with it except satisfy 
his personal needs with it, whereas at present he can turn the 
superfluity of his wealth into capital, i.e., wealth used for the 
extraction of profit. Thus society would be changed. Every 
one would have to work for his livelihood, and everybody would 
be able to do so ; whereas at present there are people who refuse 
to work for their livelihood, and forbid others to do so. Labor 
would not be wasted, as there would be no competing employ- 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 449 

ers gambling in the market, and using the real producer and the 
consumer as their milch cows. The limit of price would be the 
cost of production, so that buying and selling would be simply the 
exchange of equivalent values, and there would be no loss on 
either side in the transaction. Thus there would be a society 
in which every one would have an equal chance for well-doing, 
for, as a matter of course, arrangements would be made for the 
sustaining of people in their nonage, for keeping them in comfort 
if they were physically incapacitated from working, and also for 
educating every one according to his capacities. This would at the 
least be a society which would try to perform those functions of 
seeing that every one did his due share of work and no more, and 
had his due share of wealth and no less, and that no labor was 
wasted, which I have said were the real functions of a true so- 
ciety. 

But there is another view of the solution of the difficulty as to 
what constitutes the due share of the wealth created by labor. 
Those who take it say, since it is not really possible to find out 
what proportion of combined labor each man contributes, why 
profess to try to do so ? In a properly ordered community all 
work that is done is necessary on the one hand, and on the other 
there would be plenty of wealth in such a community to satisfy 
all reasonable needs. The community holds all wealth in com- 
mon, but has the same right to holding wealth that the individual 
has, — namely, the fact that it has created it and uses it ; but as a 
community it can only use wealth by satisfying with it the needs 
of every one of its members — it is not a true community if it 
does less than this — but their needs are not necessarily de- 
termined by the kind or amount of work which each man does, 
though, of course, when they are, that must be taken into ac- 
count. To say the least of it, men's needs are much more equal 
than their mental or bodily capacities are ; their ordinary needs, 
granting similar conditions of climate and the like, are pretty 
much the same, and could, as above said, be easily satisfied. As 
for special needs for wealth of a more special kind, reasonable 
men would be contented to sacrifice the thing which they needed 



450 WILLIAM MORRIS 

less for that which they needed more ; and for the rest, the varie- 
ties of temperament would get over the difficulties of this sort. 
As to the incentives to work, it must be remembered that even 
in our own sham society most men are not disinclined to work, so 
only that their work is not that which they are compelled to do ; 
and the higher and more intellectual the work is, the more men 
are resolved to do it, even in spite of obstacles. In fact, the ideas 
on the subject of the reward of labor in the future are founded 
on its position in the present. Life is such a terrible struggle for 
the majority, that we are all apt to think that a specially gifted 
person should be endowed with more of that which we are all 
compelled to struggle for — money, to wit — and to value his 
services simply by that standard. But in a state of society in 
which all were well-to-do, how could you reward extra services 
to the community? Give your good worker immunity from 
work? The question carries with it the condemnation of the 
idea, and, moreover, that will be the last thing he will thank you 
for. Provide for his children ? The fact that they are human 
beings with a capacity for work is enough ; they are provided for 
in being members of a community which will see that they neither 
lack work nor wealth. Give him more wealth? Nay; what 
for ? What can he do with more than he can use ? He cannot 
eat three dinners a day, or sleep in four beds. Give him domina- 
tion over other men ? Nay, if he be more excellent than they are 
in any art, he must influence them for his good and theirs, if 
they are worth anything ; but if you make him their arbitrary 
master, he will govern them, but he will not influence them; 
he and they will be enemies, and harm each other mutually. 
One reward you can give him, that is, opportunity for developing 
his special capacity, but that you will do for everybody and not 
the excellent only. Indeed, I suppose he will not, if he be ex- 
cellent, lack the admiration — or perhaps it is better to say the 
affection — of his fellow men, and he will be all the more likely 
to get that when the relations between him and them are no 
longer clouded by the fatal gift of mastership. 
In short, in a duly ordered community, everybody would do 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 451 

what he could do best, and therefore easiest, and with most 
pleasure. He who could do the higher work would do it as easily 
as the man whose capacity was less would do the lower work ; 
there would be ho more wear and tear to him in it, or if there 
were, it would mean simply that his needs were greater, and would 
have to be considered accordingly. 

Moreover, those who see this view of the new society believe 
that decentralization in it would have to be complete. The 
political unit with them is not a nation, but a commune ; the 
whole of reasonable society would be a great federation of such 
communes, federated for definite purposes of the organization of 
livelihood and exchange. For a mere nation is the historical 
deduction from the ancient tribal family, in which there was peace 
between the individuals composing it, and war with the rest of 
the world. A nation is a body of people kept together for pur- 
poses of rivalry and war with other similar bodies, and when 
competition shall have given place to combination the function 
of the nation will be gone. 

I will recapitulate, then, the two views taken among socialists 
as to the future of society. According to the first, the state — 
that is, the nation organized for unwasteful production and 
exchange of wealth — will be the sole possessor of the national 
plant and stock, the sole employer of labor, which she will so 
regulate in the general interest that no man will ever need to fear 
lack of employment and due earnings therefrom. Everybody 
will have an equal chance of livelihood, and, except as a rare dis- 
ease, there would be no hoarding of money or other wealth. 
This view points to an attempt to give everybody the full worth 
of the productive work done by him, after having insured the 
necessary preliminary that he shall always be free to work. 

According to the other view, the centralized nation would 
give place to a federation of communities who would hold all 
wealth in common, and would use that wealth for satisfying the 
needs of each member, only exacting from each that he should 
do his best according to his capacity towards the production of 
the common wealth. Of course, it is to be understood that each 



452 WILLIAM MORRIS 

member is absolutely free to use his share of wealth as he pleases 
without interference from any, so long as he really uses it; that is, 
does not turn it into an instrument for the oppression of others. 
This view intends complete equality of condition for every one, 
though life would be, as always, varied by the differences of capac- 
ity and disposition ; and emulation in working for the common 
good would supply the place of competition as an incentive. 

These two views of the future of society are sometimes opposed 
to each other as socialism and communism ; but to my mind the 
latter is simply the necessary development of the former, which 
implies a transition period, during which people would be get- 
ting rid of the habits of mind bred by the long ages of tyranny and 
commercial competition, and be learning that it is to the interest 
of each that all should thrive. 

When men had lost the fear df each other engendered by our 
system of artificial famine, they would feel that the best way of 
avoiding the waste of labor would be to allow every man to take 
what he needed from the common store, since he would have no 
temptation or opportunity of doing anything with a greater por- 
tion than he really needed for his personal use. Thus would be 
minimized the danger of the community falling into bureaucracy, 
the multiplication of boards and offices, and all the paraphernalia 
of official authority, which is after all a burden, even when it is 
exercised by the delegation of the whole people and in accord- 
ance with their wishes. 

Thus I have laid before you, necessarily briefly, a socialist's 
view of the present condition of labor, and its hopes for the 
future. If the indictment against the present society seems to 
you to be of undue proportions compared with the view of that 
which is to come, I must again remind you that we socialists 
never dream of building up by our own efforts in one generation a 
society altogether new. All I have been attacking has been the 
exercise of arbitrary authority for the supposed benefit of a 
privileged class. When we have got rid of that authority and 
are free once more, we ourselves shall do whatever may be neces- 
sary in organizing the real society which even now exists under 



LABOR QUESTION FROM SOCIALIST STANDPOINT 453 

the authority which usurps that title. That true society of 
loved and lover, parent and child, friend and friend, the society 
of well-wishers, of reasonable people conscious of the aspirations 
of humanity and the duties we owe to it through one another, — 
this society, I say, is held together and exists by his own inherent 
right and reason, in spite of what is usually thought to be the 
cement of society — arbitrary authority to wit — that is to say, 
the expression of brute force under the influence of unreasoning 
habit. Unhappily though society exists, it is in an enslaved and 
miserable condition, because that same arbitrary authority says 
to us practically : "You may be happy if you can afford it, but 
unless you have a certain amount of money, you shall not be 
allowed the exercise of the social virtues ; sentiment, affection, 
good manners, intelligence even, to you shall be mere words; 
you shall be less than men, because you are needed as machines 
to grind on in a system which has come upon us, we scarce know 
how, and which compels us, as well as you." This is the real, 
continuously repeated proclamation of law and order to the most 
part of men who are under the burden of that hierarchy of com- 
pulsion which governs us under the usurped and false title of 
society, and which all true socialists or supporters of real society 
are bound to do their best to get rid of, so as to leave us free to 
realize to the full that true society which means well-being and 
well-doing for one and all. 



XVI 

EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST 
MOVEMENT! 

John Bates Clark 

[John Bates Clark (1847-), since 1895 professor of political economy in 
Columbia University, occupies perhaps the foremost position among Eng- 
lish-speaking economists of the present time. Among his books and mon- 
ographs should be mentioned his epoch-making work on the Distribution of 
Wealth (1899), which ranks among the ablest contributions to economic 
philosophy since the days of John Stuart Mill. 

While always a theoretician, Professor Clark has shown an active interest 
in many current practical problems; this is exemplified in the following 
essay on Education and the Socialist Movement, a clear-cut presentation of 
the practical objections to socialism as they appear to the scientifically trained 
mind. Among the many analyses and refutations of the claims of the socialis- 
tic state, this essay is distinguished for its lucid argument, its moderate tone, 
and for the authority with which its author may speak on a question that 
must still be argued from theory. The optimistic attitude, with which the 
essay closes, toward the tendencies of the present industrial system is char- 
acteristic of the author's position on economic questions.] 

In a noteworthy address delivered at Princeton University, 
President Cleveland expressed the hope that our higher institu- 
tions of learning would range themselves like a wall barring the 
progress of revolutionary doctrines. If one may judge by ap- 
pearances, this hope has not been realized. There, may be a 
smaller percentage of educated persons than of uneducated ones 
in the ranks of radical socialism. Those ranks are most readily 
recruited from the body of ill-paid workingmen ; but there are 
enough highly educated persons in them to prove that socialism 
and the higher culture are not incompatible ; and a question that 

> Reprinted by permission from the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1906.^ 

454 /'■-"' 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 455 

is well worth asking and, if possible, answering, is, What is 
likely to be the permanent attitude of a scientific mind toward 
the claims of thoroughgoing socialism? Will it be generally 
conservative or the opposite? Will there be an alliance be- 
tween intelligence and discontented labor — the kind of union 
that was once cynically called a ''coalition of universities and 
slums " ? If so, it will make a formidable party. 

It is clear, in the first place, that the scientific habit of thought 
makes one hospitable to new ideas. A man who cultivates that 
habit is open to conviction where an ignorant person is not so. 
He is accustomed to pursue the truth and let the quest lead him 
where it will. He examines evidence which appears to have force, 
even although the conclusion to which it leads may be new and 
unpleasant. 

Now, at the very outset of any inquiry about socialism, there 
appear certain undisputed facts which create a prima facie case in 
its favor ; and the first of them is the beauty of the ideal which it 
presents : humanity as one family ; men working together as 
brethren, and enjoying, share and share alike, the fruits of their 
labor — what could be more attractive ? There will be an abun- 
dance for every one, and as much for the weak as for the strong ; 
and there will be no cause for envy and repining. There will be 
fraternity insured by the absence of subjects of contention. We 
shall love our brethren because we shall have no great cause to 
hate them ; such is the picture. We raise just here no question 
as to the possibility of realizing it. It is a promised land and not 
a real one that we are talking about, and for the moment we have 
given to the socialists carte blanche to do the promising. The 
picture that they hold up before us certainly has traits of beauty. 
It is good and pleasant for brethren to dweU together in unity 
and in abundance. 

Again, there is no. denying the imperfections of the present 
system both on its ethical and on its economic side. There is 
enormous inequality of conditions — want at one extreme and 
inordinate wealth at another. Many a workingman and his 
family are a prey to irregular employment and continual anxiety. 



456 JOHN BATES CLARK 

For such persons what would not a leveling out of inequalities 
do ? To a single capitalist personally a billion dollars would 
mean palaces, yachts, and a regiment of retainers. It would 
mean a redoubling of his present profusion of costly decorations, 
clothing, and furnishings, and it would mean the exhausting of 
ingenuity in inventing pleasures, all of which, by a law of human 
nature, would pall on the man from mere abundance. What 
would the billionaire lose by parting with ninety-nine one hun- 
dredths of his wealth ? With the modest ten millions that would 
be left he could have every pleasure and advantage that money 
ought to purchase. What would not the sum he would surrender 
do for a hundred thousand laborers and their families ? It would 
provide comforts for something like half a million persons. It 
would give them means of culture and of health, banish the 
hunger specter, and cause them to live in mental security 
and peace. In short, at the cost of practically nothing for 
one man, the redistribution we have imagined would trans- 
late half a million persons to a comfortable and hopeful level 
of life. 

Again, the growth of those corporations to which we give the 
name of "trusts" has lessened the force of one stock argument 
against socialism, and added a wholly new argument in its favor. 
The difficulty of managing colossal enterprises formerly stood 
in many minds as the chief consideration against nationalization 
of capital and industry. What man, or what body of men, can 
possibly be wise and skillful enough to handle such operations ? 
They are now, in some instances, in process of handling them, and 
those who wish to change the present order tell us that all we 
have to do is to transfer the ownership of them to the state, and 
let them continue working as they do at present. We have found 
men wise enough to manage the trusts, and probably, in most 
cases, they are honest enough to do so in the interest of the 
stockholders. On the question of honesty the socialist has the 
advantage in the argument, for he will tell us that with the pri- 
vate ownership of capital made impossible by law, the tempta- 
tion to dishonesty is removed. If the socialistic state could be 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 457 

warranted free from "graft," this would constitute the largest 
single argument in its favor. 

It is, indeed, not the same thing to manage a myriad of indus- 
tries as to manage a single one, because certain nice adjustments 
have to be made between the several industries, and we shall see 
what this difliculty signifies ; but as we are looking only at prima 
facie claims, we will give to the argument from the existence of 
trusts all the force that belongs to it. 

As the difficulty of nationalizing production has been reduced, 
the need of it has been increased, for the trusts are becoming 
partial monopolies, able to raise prices, reduce wages, cheapen 
raw materials, and make themselves, if they shall go much farther 
in this line, altogether intolerable. Indeed, the single fact of the 
presence of private monopoly, and the lack of any obvious and 
sure plan of successfully dealing with it, has been enough to con- 
vert a multitude of intelligent men to the socialistic, view. 

Here, then, is a list of arguments making an effective case for 
socialism : the beauty of its ideal, the glaring inequalities of the 
present system, the reduction of the difficulty of managing great 
industries through public officials, the growing evils of private 
monopoly, and the preference for public monopoly as a mode of 
escape. They captivate a multitude of persons, and it is time 
carefully to weigh them. It is necessary to decide whether the 
promises of the socialistic state are to be trusted. Would the 
ideal materialize? Is it a substantial thing, within reachable 
distance, or is it a city in the clouds ? If it is not wholly away 
from the earth, is it on the delectable mountains of a remote 
millennium ? Is it as wholly desirable as it at first appears ? 

There are some considerations which any educated mind should 
be able to grasp, which reduce the attractiveness of the socialistic 
ideal itself. Shall we transform humanity into a great band of 
brethren by abolishing private property ? Differences of wealth 
which now excite envy would, of course, be removed. The temp- 
tation to covetousness would be reduced, since there would not 
be much to covet. There would be nothing a man could do with 
plunder — unless he could emigrate with it. Would "hatred 



458 JOHN BATES CLARK 

and all uncharitableness " be therefore completely absent, or 
would they be present in a form that would still make 
trouble ? 

Even though there would be no differences of possessions 
between man and man, there would be great differences in 
the desirability of different kinds of labor. Some work is safe 
and some is dangerous. Some is agreeable and some is dis- 
agreeable. The artist, the author, the scientist, the explorer, 
and the inventor take pleasure in their work ; and that is not 
often to be said of the stoker, the grinder of tools, the coal 
miner, or the worker in factories where explosives or poisons are 
made. It is not to be said of any one who has to undergo ex- 
hausting labor for long hours. In industries managed by the 
state there would be no practicable way of avoiding the necessity 
of assigning men to disagreeable, arduous, unhealthful, or dan- 
gerous employments. Selections of men for such fields of labor 
would in some way have to be made, and those selected for the 
undesirable tasks would have to be held to them by public 
authority. Well would it be if the men so consigned, looking 
upon the more fortunate workers, were not good material for 
an army of discontent. Well would it be if their discontent were 
not turned into suspicion of their rulers and charges of favorit- 
ism in personal treatment. There would not be, as now, an 
abstraction called a "system," on which, as upon the camel's 
back, it would be possible to load the prevalent evils. Strong in 
the affections of the people must be the personnel of a government 
that could survive the discontent which necessary inequalities of 
treatment would excite. Would the government be likely to be 
thus strong in popular affection ? We may judge as to this if we 
look at one further peculiarity of it. 

The pursuit of wealth now furnishes the outlet for the over- 
mastering ambition of many persons. In the new state, the 
desire to rise in the world would have only one main outlet, 
namely, politics. The work of governing the country, and that 
of managing its industries, would be merged in one great official 
body. The contrast between rulers and ruled would be enor- 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 459 

mously heightened by this concentration of power in the hands of 
the rulers, and by the further fact that the ruled would never be 
able, by means of wealth, to acquire an offset for the advantages 
of ofhceholding. The desire for public position must therefore 
be intensified. 

There would be some prizes to be gained, in a worthy way, by 
other kinds of service, such as authorship, invention, and discov- 
ery ; but the prizes which would appeal to most men would be 
those of officialdom. Is it in reason to suppose that the method 
of securing the ofiices would then be better than it is at present ? 
Would a man, under the new regime, work quietly at his task in 
the shoe shop, the bakery, or the mine, waiting for the office to 
which he aspired to seek him out, or would he try to make terms 
with other men for mutual assistance in the quest of office? 
Would rings be less general than they are now? Could there 
fail to be bosses and political machines ? Would the Tammanys 
of the new order, then, be an improvement on the Tammanys of 
the old order ? To the sober second thought which mental train- 
ing ought to favor, it appears that the claim of the socialistic 
state to a peculiar moral excellence brought about by its equality 
of possessions needs a very thorough sifting. 

Without making any dogmatic assertions, we may say that 
there would certainly have to be machines of some sort for push- 
ing men into public offices, and that these would have very sinis- 
ter possibilities. They would be opposed by counter machines, 
made up of men out of office and anxious to get in. ''I am able 
to see," said Marshal MacMahon, when nearing the end of his 
brief presidency of the French Republic, "that there are two 
classes of men — those who command and those who must obey." 
If the demarcation were as sharp as that in actual society, and if 
the great prizes in life were political, brief indeed might be the 
tenure of place by any one party, and revolutions of more than 
South American frequency might be the normal state of society. 
One may look at the ideal which collectivism ^ presents, with no 

^ The economic idea underlying socialism : ownership by the community 
of all the means of production. — Editors. 



460 JOHN BATES CLARK 

thought of such dangers ; but it is the part of intelligence at least 
to take account of them. 

Besides the fact that some would be in office and others out, 
and that some would be in easy and desirable trades and others in 
undesirable ones, there would be the further fact that some would 
live in the city and some in the country, and that the mere local- 
izing of occupations would afford difficulty for the ruling class 
and be a further cause of possible discontent. But a much more 
serious test of the capacity of the government would have to be 
made in another way. Very nice adjustments would have to be 
made between agriculture on one hand, and manufactures and 
commerce on the other; and further adjustments would have 
to be made between the different branches of each generic divi- 
sion. All this would be done, not automatically as at present, 
by the action of demand and supply in a market, but by the vol- 
untary acts of officials. Here is the field in which the wisdom 
of officials would be overtaxed. They might manage the mills 
of the steel trust, but it would trouble them to say how many 
men should be employed in that business and how many in 
every other, and of the men in that generic branch, how many 
should work in Pittsburg and how many in the mines of Michigan 
and Minnesota. 

A fine economic classic is the passage in which Bishop Whately 
describes the difficulty of provisioning the City of London by the 
action of an official commissariat, and contrasts it with the per- 
fection with which this is now done without such official control. 
Individuals, each of whom seeks only to promote his own inter- 
est, work in harmony, prevent waste, and secure the city against 
a lack of any needed element. Far greater would be the con- 
trast between satisfying by public action every want of a nation, 
and doing this by the present automatic process ; and yet crude 
thought even calls competition "chaotic," and calls on the state 
to substitute an orderly process. Into that particular error dis- 
criminating thought will not readily fall. 

Difficulties which a discerning eye perceives, and an undiscern- 
ing one neglects, thus affect the conclusion that is reached as to 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 461 

whether a sociahstic plan of industry could or could not be made 
to work. Ignorance does not so much as encounter the real 
difficulties in the case, but lightly assumes that the plan would 
work, and is eager to try it. I am not, here and now, claiming 
that the difficulties cited positively prove that the scheme would 
not work. Granting now, for the sake of further argument, 
that it could be made to work — that on the political side it 
would proceed smoothly and peaceably, and that on the economic 
side it would run on no fatal rocks — would it give a material 
result worth having ? 

Here is a chance for a wider range of difference between the 
conclusions of different minds. There are three specific conse- 
quences of the socialistic plan of industry, each of which is at 
least possible ; and a prospect that all of them would occur to- 
gether would suffice to deter practically every one from adhering 
to this plan. Estimates of the probability of these evils will 
vary, but that each one of the three is possible, is not to be de- 
nied. Of these results, the first is, on the whole, the gravest. 
It is the check that socialism might impose on technical prog- 
ress. At present we see a bewildering succession of inventions 
transforming the industries of the world. Machine after ma- 
chine appears in rapid succession, each displacing its predecessor, 
working for a time and giving way to still better devices. The 
power of man over nature increases with amazing rapidity. 
Even in the relatively simple operations of agriculture, the reaper, 
the thresher, the seeder, and the gang plow enable a man to- 
day to do as much work as could a score of men in the colonial 
period of American history. In manufacturing, the gain is 
greater ; and in transportation, it is indefinitely greater. The 
progress goes on without cessation, since the thing which guaran- 
tees it is the impulse of self-preservation. An employer must 
improve his mechanism if his rivals do so. He must now and 
then get ahead of his rivals if he is to make any profit. Con- 
servatism which adheres to the old is self-destruction, and a 
certain audacity affords the nearest approach to safety. From 
this it comes about, first, that forward movements are made 



462 JOHN BATES CLARK 

daily and hourly in some part of the field ; and, secondly, that 
with every forward movement the whole procession must move 
on to catch up with its new leader. 

Now, it is possible to suppose that under socialism an altru- 
istic motive may lead men to make inventions and discoveries. 
They may work for the good of humanity. The desire for dis- 
tinction may also impel them to such labors, and non-pecuniary 
rewards offered by the state may second this desire. The in- 
ventive impulse may act even where no reward is in view. Men 
will differ greatly in their estimates of the amount of progress 
that can be gained in this way; but the thing that may be 
afl&rmed without danger of denial is, that the competitive race 
absolutely compels progress at a rate that is inspiringly rapid, 
and that there is much uncertainty as to the amount of progress 
that would be secured where other motives are relied on. Offi- 
cialdom is generally unfavorable to the adoption of improved 
devices, even when they are presented; its boards have fre- 
quently been the graveyards of inventions, and there is no blink- 
ing the uncertainty as to whether a satisfactory rate of improve- 
ment could be obtained where the methods of production should 
be at the mercy of such boards. The keener the intelligence, the 
more clearly it will perceive the importance of progress, and the 
immeasurable e\dl that would follow any check upon it; the 
more also it will dread every cause of uncertainty as to the main- 
tenance of the present rate of improvement. 

An important fact concerning competitive industry is the ease 
with which new technical methods translate themselves, first 
into temporary profits for employers, and then into abiding 
returns for other classes. The man who introduces an efficient 
machine makes money by the means until his competitors get a 
similar appliance, after which the profit vanishes. The product 
of the machine still enriches society, by diffusing itself among the 
people in the shape of lower prices of goods. The profit from 
any one such device is bound to be temporary, while the gain 
that comes from cheap goods is permanent. If we watch some 
one industry, like shoemaking or cotton spinning, we find profits 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 463 

appearing and vanishing, and appearing again and vanishing 
again. If we include in our vision the system as a whole, we 
find them appearing now in one branch of industry, now in 
another, and now in still another, shifting forever their places 
in the system, but always present somewhere. Steel, cotton, 
wool, machinery, or flour, takes its turn in affording gains to its 
producer, and these gains constitute the largest source of addi- 
tions to capital. These natural profits in themselves burden 
nobody. Not only is there in them no trace of exploitation of 
labor, but from the very start the influence that yields the profit 
improves the condition of labor, and in the end labor, as the great- 
est of all consumers, gets the major benefit.^ 

Now, an important fact is that such profits based on improved 
technical processes naturally, and almost necessarily, add them- 
selves to capital. The employer wishes to enlarge his business 
while the profits last — " to make hay while the sun shines." He 
has no disposition to spend the income which he knows will be 
transient, but has every disposition to enlarge the scale of his 
operations and provide a permanent income for the future. 
Easily, naturally, painlessly, the great accretions of capital 
come ; mainly by advances in technical operations of production. 

In the socialistic state all the incomes of the year would be 
pooled. They would make a composite sum out of which every 
one's stipend woiild have to be taken. There would be no spe- 
cial and personal profit for any one. The gains that come from 
improved technique would not be distinguishable from those that 
come from other sources. Every one would be a laborer, and 
every one would get his daily or weekly stipend ; and if capital 
had to be increased, — if the needs of an enlarging business had 
to be provided for at all, — it could only be done by withholding 
some part of that stipend. It would be an unwelcome way of 
making accumulations. It would mean the conscious acceptance 

1 A fuller treatment of this subject would take account of the incidental 
evils which inventions often cause, by forcing some persons to change their 
employments, and would show that these evils were once great but are now 
smaller and destined to diminish. 



464 JOHN BATES CLARK 

by the entire working class of a smaller income than might 
otherwise be had. If one has heroic confidence in the far-seeing 
quality and in the generous purpose of the working class, he may 
perhaps think that it will reconcile itself to this painful self- 
denial for the benefit of the future ; but it is clear that there are 
large probabilities in the other direction. There is danger that 
capital would not be thus saved in sufficient quantity, and that, 
if it were not so, no power on earth could prevent the earning 
capacity of labor from suffering in consequence. From mere 
dearth of capital the socialistic state, though it were more pro- 
gressive than we think, would be in danger of becoming poorer 
and poorer. 

There is another fact concerning the present system which a 
brief study of economics brings to every one's attention, and 
which has a very close connection with the outlook for the future 
of laborers. It is the growth of population. The Malthusian 
doctrine of population maintains that increased wages are fol- 
lowed by a quick increase in the number of the working people, 
and that this brings the wages down to their former level. ^ On its 
face it appears to say that there is not much hope of permanent 
gains for labor, and it was this teaching which was chiefly respon- 
sible for giving to political economy the nickname of the "dismal 
science." It is true that the teachings of Malthus contain a pro- 
viso whereby it is not impossible under a certain condition that 
the wages of labor may permanently increase. Something may 
raise the standard of living more or less permanently, and this 
fact may nullify the tendency of population to increase unduly. 
Modern teachings make the utmost of this saving proviso, and 
show that standards have in fact risen, that families of the well- 
to-do are smaller than those of empty-handed laborers, and that, 
with advancing wages based on enlarged producing power, the 
workers may not see their gains slipping from their hands in the 
old Malthusian fashion, but may hold them more and more 
firmly. Progress may cause further progress. 

Now, socialism proposes to place families in a condition resem- 
*T. R. Malthus, Essay on Population, 1798. — Editors. 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 465 

bling that in which, in American history, the natural growth has 
been most rapid, the condition, namely, in which children are 
ijiaintained without cost to parents, as they were when they lived 
on farms and were set working at an early age. If this should 
mean that the old Malthusian law would operate in the socialistic 
state, the experiment would be hopelessly wrecked. If the state 
provides for children from their birth to the end of their lives, the 
particular influence that puts a check on the size of families will 
be absent. One may not affirm with positiveness that the worst 
form of Malthusianism would actually operate under socialism ; 
nothing but experiment will give certain knowledge in this par- 
ticular; but what a little discernment makes perfectly certain 
is, that there would be danger of this. 

Quite apart, then, from political uncertainties, three coordinate 
influences on the purely economic side must be taken full account 
of by anybody who would intelligently advocate the nationaliz- 
ing of production. There are : first, the probable check on tech- 
nical progress ; secondly, the difficulty encountered in enlarging 
capital ; and thirdly, the possible impetus to the growth of pop- 
ulation. If the first two influences were to work without the 
other, socialism would mean that we should all slowly grow poor 
together; and if the third influence were also to operate, we 
should grow poor very rapidly. 

We have not proved, as if by incontestable mathematics, that 
socialism is not practicable and not desirable. We have cited 
facts which lead a majority of persons to believe this. The 
unfavorable possibilities of socialism bulk large in an intelligent 
view, but positive proof as to what would happen in such a state 
can come only through actual experience. Some country must 
turn itself into an experimental laboratory for testing the collec- 
tive mode of production and distribution, before the world can 
definitely know what that process would involve. In advance 
of this test, there is a line of inquiry which yields a more assured 
conclusion than can any estimate of a state which, as yet, is 
imaginary. It is the study of the present industrial system and 
its tendencies. When we guess that the collective management 



466 JOHN BATES CLARK 

of all production by the state would fail to work, and would lead 
to poverty even if it succeeded in working, we are met by those 
who guess it would succeed and lead to general abundance ; and 
they will certainly claim that their guesses are worth as much as 
ours. As to the tendencies of the present state, and the outlook 
they afford, it is possible to know much more. The testimony 
of facts is positive as to some things, and very convincing as to 
others. 

No one is disposed to deny the dazzling series of technical 
improvements which the rivalries of the present day insure. 
There is not only progress, but a law of progress ; not only the 
productive power that we are gaining, but the force that, if 
allowed to work, will forever compel us to gain it. There is no 
assignable limit to the power that man will hereafter acquire 
over nature. Again and again, in the coming years and cen- 
turies, will the wand of inventive genius smite the rock and cause 
new streams of wealth to gush forth ; and, as already said, much 
of this new wealth will take naturally and easily the form of 
capital. It will multiply and improve the tools that labor works 
with ; and a fact which science proves is that the laborer, quite 
apart from the capitalist, thrives by the operation. He gets 
higher and higher pay as his method of laboring becomes more 
fruitful. It is as though he were personally bringing for his own 
use new streams from the rock ; and even though this worker 
were striking a landlord's rock with a capitalist's hammer, the 
new stream could not fail to come largely to himself. 

Mere labor will have increasing power to create wealth, and to 
get wealth, as its methods improve and its tools more and more 
abound. This will not transform the workingman's whole life in 
a day — it will not instantly place him where the rubbing of a 
lamp will make genii his servants, but it will give him to-morrow 
more than he gets to-day, and the day after to-morrow still more. 
It will enable his own efforts to raise him surely, steadily, in- 
spiringly, toward the condition of which he dreams. It will 
throw sunshine on the future hills — substantial and reachable 
hills, though less briUiant than pictured mountain.^ of cloudland. 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 467 

Well within the possibilities of a generation or two is the gain 
that will make the worker comfortable and care free. Like the 
village blacksmith, he may "look the whole world in the face" 
with independence, but with no latent enmity. Manly self- 
assertion there may be, with no sense of injury. The well-paid 
laborer may stand before the rich without envy, as the rich will 
stand before him without pity or condescension. It may be that 
the condition described by Edward Atkinson, in which it "will 
not pay to be rich" because of the cares which wealth must 
bring, may never arrive. It will always be better to have some- 
thing than to have nothing ; but it may, at some time, be better 
to have relatively little than to have inordinately much; and 
the worker may be able to come nearer and nearer to the state 
in which, for him, comforts are plentiful and anxieties are scarce. 
Amid a vast inequality of mere possessions, there may be less and 
less of inequality of genuine welfare. Many a man with a modest 
store may have no wish to change lots with the multimillionaire. 
For comfortable living, for high thinking, and for the finer traits 
of humanity, the odds may be in his favor. 

In such a state there might easily be realized a stronger democ- 
racy than any which a leveling of fortunes would bring. Pulling 
others down that we may pull ourselves up is not a good initial 
step in a regime of brotherhood ; but raising ourselves and others 
together is the very best step from the first and throughout. And 
the fraternity which comes in this way is by far the finer, because 
of inequality of possessions. If we can love no man truly unless 
we have as much money as he has, our brotherly spirit is of a 
very peculiar kind, and the fraternity that would depend on such 
a leveling would have no virility. It would have the pulpy fiber 
of a rank weed, while the manlier brotherhood that grows in the 
midst of inequality has the oaken fiber that endures. The rela- 
tively poor we shall have with us, and the inordinately rich as well; 
but it is in the power of humanity to project its fraternal bonds 
across the chasms which such conditions create. Though there be 
thrones and principalities in our earthly paradise, they will not mar 
its perfection, but will develop the finer traits of its inhabitants. 



468 JOHN BATES CLARK 

This state is the better because it is not cheaply attained. 
There are difficulties to be surmounted, which we have barely 
time to mention and no time to discuss. One of the greatest of 
these is the vanishing of much competition. The eager rivalry 
in perfecting methods and multiplying products, which is at the 
basis of our confidence in the future, seems to have here and there 
given place to monopoly, which always means apathy and stagna- 
tion. We have before us a struggle — a successful one, if we 
rise to the occasion — to keep alive the essential force of compe- 
tition ; and this fact reveals the very practical relation which 
intelligence sustains to the different proposals for social improve- 
ment. It must put us in the way of keeping effective the main- 
spring of progress — of surmounting those evils which mar the 
present prospect. Trained intelligence here has its task marked 
out for it : it must show that monopoly can be effectively attacked, 
and must point out the way to do it — a far different way from 
any yet adopted. Our people have the fortunes of themselves, 
their children, and their children's children, in their own hands. 
Surely, and even somewhat rapidly, may the gains we have out- 
lined be made to come by united effort guided by intelligent 
thought. 

It requires discernment to estimate progress itself at its true 
value. John Stuart Mill made the remark that no system could 
be worse than the present one, if that system did not admit of 
improvement. This remark could be made of any system. How- 
ever fair a social state might at the outset appear, it would be 
essentially bad if it could never change for the better. The so- 
ciety in which efficient methods supplant inefficient ones, and in 
which able directors come naturally into control of production, 
insures a perpetual survival of excellence, and however low might 
be the state from which such a course of progress took its start, 
the society would ultimately excel any stationary one that could 
be imagined. A Purgatory actuated by the principle which guar- 
antees improvement will surpass, in the end, a Paradise which has 
not this dynamic quality. For a limited class in our own land — 
chiefly in the slums of cities — life has too much of the purga- 



EDUCATION AND THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 469 

torial quality ; for the great body of its inhabitants the condition 
it affords, though by no means a paradise, is one that would have 
seemed so to many a civilization of the past and to many a foreign 
society of to-day. On its future course it is starting from a high 
level, and is moved by a powerful force toward an ideal which 
will some day be a reality, and which is therefore inspiring to 
look upon, even in the distance. 

Like Webster, we may hail the advancing generations and bid 
them welcome to a land that is fairer than our own, and promises 
to grow fairer and fairer forever. That this prospect be not im- 
periled — that the forces that make it a reality be enabled to do 
their work — is what the men of the future ask of the intelligence 
of to-day. 



XVII 

THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 

John Stuart Mill 

[John Stuart Mill's essay, The Subjection of Women (1867), his last pub- 
lished work, is one of the pioneer documents in a cause that has received 
constantly increasing attention. Throughout his life Mill had favored the 
emancipation of women ; but the influence most directly responsible for the 
volume that embodies his opinions on the subject was his wife, to whom he 
also assigns a great share of the credit for the work On Liberty. She her- 
self had written an essay on the Enfranchisement of Women which, with her 
discussions with her husband, laid the foundation for his book. 

The first chapter of this work has been selected to present the basic argu- 
ments of the modern suffrage movement, as the book can still claim to be a 
classic of its kind, despite the fact that it is out of date and that many of the 
unfair discriminations of that day no longer exist. The distinctive feature of 
Mill's argument on the emancipation question consists in his assertion that 
the difference of sex is accidental, like the difference of color, and that there 
are no grounds for forming any conclusions about the limitations of woman, 
as we really know absolutely nothing about the possibiHties of her nature. 
Needless to say. Mill's views, in an age still innocent of miUtant propaganda, 
brought down upon him a storm of criticism, even from the liberals. A brief 
for the conservatives on this still very live question is given by Mr. Frederic 
Harrison in the next essay.] 

The object of this essay is to explain, as clearly as I am able, 
the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest 
period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or politi- 
cal matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, 
has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflec- 
tion and the experience of life : That the principle which regulates 
the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal 
subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and 
now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and 

470 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 471 

that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, 
admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability 
on the other. 

The very words necessary to express the task I have under- 
taken, show how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to 
suppose that the difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency 
or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my conviction 
rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which 
there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as an 
opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses 
in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument 
against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the 
refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the con- 
viction ; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in 
argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are 
that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the argu- 
ments do not reach ; and while the feeling remains, it is always 
throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any 
breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending 
to make the feelings connected with this subject the most in- 
tense and most deeply rooted of all those which gather round and 
protect old institutions and customs, that we need not wonder 
to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the. 
rest by the progress of the great modern spiritual and social tran- 
sition; nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling 
longest must be less barbarisms than those which they earlier 
shake off. 

In every respect the burden is hard on those who attack an 
almost universal opinion. They must be very fortunate, as well 
as unusually capable, if they obtain a hearing at all. They have 
more difficulty in obtaining a trial than any other litigants have 
in getting a verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are sub- 
jected to a set of logical requirements totally different from 
those exacted from other people. In all other cases, the bur- 
den of proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative. If a 
person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who accuse 



472 JOHN STUART MILL 



him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his inno 
cence. If there is a difference of opinion about the reality of any 
alleged historical event, in which the feelings of men in general 
are not much interested, as the siege of Troy for example, those 
who maintain that the event took place are expected to produce 
their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required 
to say anything ; and at no time are these required to do more 
than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no 
value. Again, in practical matters, the burden of proof is sup- 
posed to be with those who are against liberty ; who contend for 
any restriction or prohibition ; either any liinitation of the gen- 
eral freedom of human action, or any disqualification or disparity 
of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared 
with others. The a priori presumption is in favor of freedom and 
impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint not 
required by the general good, and that the law should be no re- 
specter of persons, but should treat all ahke, save where dissimi- 
larity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of 
justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will 
the benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I pro- 
fess. It is useless for me to say that those who maintain the 
doctrine that men have a right to command and women are under 
9,n obligation to obey, or that men are fit for government and 
women unfit, are on the afiirmative side of the question, and that 
they are bound to show positive e^ddence for the assertions, or 
submit to their rejection. It is equally unavailing for me to say 
that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly 
allowed to men, having the double presumption against them 
that they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality, 
must be held to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their 
success be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought to 
go against them. These would be thought good pleas in any 
common case ; but they will not be thought so in this instance. 
Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected 
not only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take 
the other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be 



1 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 473 

said by them — to find them in reasons, as well as answer all 
I find : and besides refuting all arguments for the afl&rmative, I 
shall be called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove 
a negative. And even if I could do all this, and leave the opposite 
party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and 
not a single unrefuted one on their side, I should be thought to 
have done little ; for a cause supported on the one hand by uni- 
versal usage, and on the other by so great a preponderance of 
popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its 
favor superior to any conviction which an appeal to reason has 
power to produce in any intellects but those of a high class. 

I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them : first, be- 
cause it would be useless ; they are inseparable from having to 
contend through people's understandings against the hostility of 
their feelings and practical tendencies : and truly the under- 
standings of the majority of mankind would need to be much bet- 
ter cultivated than has ever yet been the case, before they could 
be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating 
arguments as to give up practical principles in which they have 
been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the exist- 
ing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which 
they are not capable of logically resisting. I do not therefore 
quarrel with them for having too little faith in argument, but for 
having too much faith in custom and the general feeling. It 
is one of the characteristic prejudices of the reaction of the nine- 
teenth century against the eighteenth, to accord to the unrea- 
soning elements in human nature the infallibility which the 
eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning 
elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that 
of Instinct ; and we call everything instinct which we find in 
ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. 
This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the 
most pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of 
which it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground 
until it gives way before a sound psychology, laying bare the real 
root of much that is bowed down to as the intention of nature 



474 JOHN STUART MILL 

and the ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I 
am willing to accept the unfavorable conditions which the preju- 
dice assigns to me. I consent that established custom, and the 
general feeling, should be deemed conclusive against me, unless 
that custom and feeling from age to age can be shown to have 
owed their existence to other causes than their soundness, and 
to have derived their power from the worse rather than the better 
parts of human nature. I am willing that judgment should 
go against me, unless I can show that my judge has been tam- 
pered with. The concession is not so great as it might appear ; 
for to prove this is by far the easiest portion of my task. 

The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presump- 
tion that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable 
ends. This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or 
afterwards kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded 
on experience of the mode in which they could be most effectually 
attained. If the authority of men over women, when first estab- 
lished, had been the result of conscientious comparison between 
different modes of constituting the government of society; if, 
after trying various other modes of social organization — the 
government of women over men, equality between the two, and 
such mixed and divided modes of government as might be in- 
vented — it had been decided, on the testimony of experience, 
that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, 
having no share at all in public concerns, and each in private 
being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with 
whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement most 
conducive to the happiness and well-being of both ; its general 
adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, 
at the time when it was adopted, it was the best : though even 
then the considerations which recommended it may, like so 
many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have 
subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist. But the 
state of the case is in every respect the reverse of this. In the 
first place, the opinion in favor of the present system, which en- 
tirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 475 

theory only ; for there never has been trial made of any other : 
so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to 
theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. 
And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality 
never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social 
ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of 
humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the 
fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every 
woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined 
with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state 
of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always 
begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing be- 
tween individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact 
into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally 
aim at the substitution of public and organized means of assert- 
ing and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular and law- 
less conflict of physical strength. Those who had already been 
compelled to obedience became in this manner legally bound to 
it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of force between the master 
and the slave, became regularized and a matter of compact 
among the masters, who, binding themselves to one another for 
common protection, guaranteed by their collective strength the 
private possessions of each, including his slaves. In early times 
the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the 
whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages 
of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to ques- 
tion the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either 
of the one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did 
arise : and (the general progress of society assisting) the slavery 
of the male sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at 
least (though, in one of them, only within the last few years 
been at length abolished, and that of the female sex has been 
gradually changed into a milder form of dependence. But this 
dependence, as it exists at present, is not an original institution, 
taking a fresh start from considerations of justice and social ex- 
1 Serfdom was not abolished in Russia until i86i. — Editors. 



476 JOHN STUART MILL 

pediency — it is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through 
successive mitigations and modifications occasioned by the same 
causes which have softened the general manners, and brought all 
human relations more under the control of justice and the influ- 
ence of humanity. It has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. 
No presumption in its favor, therefore, can be drawn from the 
fact of its existence. The only such presumption which it could 
be supposed to have, must be grounded on its having lasted till 
now, when so many other things which came down from the same 
odious source have been done away with. And this, indeed, is 
what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it asserted that 
the inequality of rights between men and women has no other 
source than the law of the strongest. 

That this statement should have the effect of a paradox is in 
some respects creditable to the progress of civilization, and the 
improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now 
live — that is to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of 
the world now live — in a state in which the law of the strongest 
seems to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the 
world's affairs : nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the 
relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practice 
it. When any one succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some 
pretext which gives him the semblance of having some general 
social interest on his side. This being the ostensible state of 
things, people flatter themselves that the rule of mere force is 
ended ; that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason of exist- 
ence of anything which has remained in full operation down to 
the present time. However any of our present institutions may 
have begun, it can only, they think, have been preserved to this 
period of advanced civilization by a well-grounded feeling of its 
adaptation to human nature, and conduciveness to the general 
good. They do not understand the great vitality and durability 
of institutions which place right on the side of might ; how in- 
tensely they are clung to ; how the good as well as the bad pro- 
pensities and sentiments of those who have power in their hands 
become identified with retaining it ; how slowly these bad insti- 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 477 

tutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning with 
those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life; 
and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power be- 
cause they first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until 
the physical power had passed over to the other side. Such 
shifting of the physical force not having taken place in the case 
of women, this fact, combined with all the peculiar and charac- 
teristic features of the particular case, made it certain from the 
first that this branch of the system of right founded on might, 
though softened in its most atrocious features at an earlier period 
than several of the others, would be the very last to disappear. It 
was inevitable that this one case of a social relation grounded on 
force would survive through generations of institutions grounded 
on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general char- 
acter of their laws and customs ; but which, so long as it does not 
proclaim its own origin, and as discussion has not brought out its 
true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilization, any 
more than domestic slavery among the Greeks jarred with their 
notion of themselves as a free people. 

The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or 
three generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive con- 
dition of humanity ; and only the few who have studied history 
accurately, or have much frequented the parts of the world oc- 
cupied by the living representatives of ages long past, are able 
to form any mental picture of what society then was. People 
are not aware how entirely, in former ages, the law of superior 
strength was the rule of life; how publicly and openly it was 
avowed, I do not say cynically or shamelessly — for these words 
imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of, 
and no such notion could find a place in the faculties of any per- 
son in those ages, except a philosopher or a saint. History gives 
a cruel experience of human nature, in showing how exactly the 
regard due to the life, possessions, and entire earthly happiness of 
any class of persons, was measured by what they had the power 
of enforcing; how all who made any resistance to authorities 
that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be the" 



478 JOHN STUART MILL 

provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws and 
all the notions of social obligation against them ; and in the eyes 
of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but of 
the worst of all crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement 
which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a 
feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in 
inferiors, began when he had been induced, for convenience, to 
make some promise to them. Though these promises, even 
when sanctioned by the most solemn oaths, were for many ages 
revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or tempta- 
tion, it is probable that this, except by persons of still worse than 
the average morality, was seldom done without some twinges of 
conscience. The ancient republics, being mostly grounded from 
the first upon some kind of mutual compact, or at any rate 
formed by a union of persons not very unequal in strength, af- 
forded, in consequence, the first instance of a portion of human 
relations fenced round, and placed under the dominion of another 
law than that of force. And though the original law of force re- 
mained in full operation between them and their slaves, and also 
(except so far as limited by express compact) between a common- 
wealth and its subjects, or other independent commonwealths; 
the banishment of that primitive law, even from so narrow a field, 
commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving birth 
to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the im- 
mense value even for material interests, and which thencefor- 
ward only required to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves 
were no part of the commonwealth, it was in the free states that 
slaves were first felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics 
were, I believe, the first (except so far as the Jewish law consti- 
tutes an exception) who taught as a part of morality that men were 
bound by moral obligations to their slaves. No one, after Chris- 
tianity became ascendant, could ever again have been a stranger 
to this belief, in theory ; nor, after the rise of the Catholic Church, 
was it ever without persons to stand up for it. Yet to enforce it 
was the most arduous task which Christianity ever had to per- 
form. For more than a thousand years the Church kept up the 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 479 

contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It was not for 
want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious. It 
could make kings and nobles resign their most valued posses- 
sions to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the 
prime of life and the height of worldly advantages, shut them- 
selves up in convents to work out their salvation by poverty, 
fasting, and prayer. It could send hundreds of thousands across 
land and sea, Europe and Asia, to give their lives for the deliver- 
ance of the Holy Sepulcher. It could make kings relinquish 
wives who were the object of their passionate attachment, be- 
cause the Church declared that they were within the seventh 
(by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship. All 
this it did ; but it could not make men fight less with one another, 
nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when they were able, 
over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of the 
applications of force: force militant, or force triumphant. This 
they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in 
their turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing 
power of kings was an end put to fighting except between kings, 
or competitors for kingship ; only by the growth of a wealthy and 
warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of a plebeian in- 
fantry which proved more powerful in the field than the undis- 
ciplined chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the 
bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds. It was 
persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had ob- 
tained a power enabling them often to take conspicuous venge- 
ance ; and on the Continent much of it continued to the time of 
the French Revolution, though in England the earher and better 
organization of the democratic classes put an end to it sooner, by 
establishing equal laws and free national institutions. 

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the 
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was 
the avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special 
and exceptional consequence of peculiar ties — and from how 
very recent a date it is that the affairs of society in general have 
been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law ; 



48o JOHN STUART MILL 

as little do people remember or consider how institutions and cus- 
toms which never had any ground but the law of force, last on 
into ages and states of general opinion which never would have 
permitted their first establishment. Less than forty years ago, 
EngUshmen might still by law hold human beings in bondage as 
salable property; within the present century they might kid- 
nap them and carry them off, and work them literally to death. 
This absolutely extreme case of the law of force, condemned 
by those who can tolerate almost every other form of arbi- 
trary power, and which, of all others, presents features the 
most revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an im- 
partial position, was the law of civihzed and Christian Eng- 
land within the memory of persons now living ; and in one half 
of Anglo-Saxon America three or four years ago, not only did 
slavery exist, but the slave trade, and the breeding of slaves ex- 
pressly for it, was a general practice between slave states. Yet 
not only was there a greater strength of sentiment against it, but 
in England, at least, a less amount either of feehng or of interest in 
favor of it, than of any other of the customary abuses of force : 
for its motive was the love of gain, unmixed and undisguised ; and 
those who profited by it were a very small numerical fraction of 
the country, while the natural feeling of all who were not per- 
sonally interested in it, was unmitigated abhorrence. So ex- 
treme an instance makes it almost superfluous to refer to any 
other : but consider the long duration of absolute monarchy. In 
England at present it is the almost universal conviction that 
military despotism is a case of the law of force, having no other 
origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations of Europe 
except England it either still exists, or has only just ceased to 
exist, and has even now a strong party favorable to it in all ranks 
of the people, especially among persons of station and conse- 
quence. Such is the power of an established system, even when 
far from universal ; when not only in almost every period of his- 
tory there have been great and well-known examples of the con- 
trary system, but these have almost invariably been afforded by 
the most illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 481 

case, too, the possessor of the undue power, the person directly 
interested in it, is only one person, while those who are subject 
to it and suffer from it are literally all the rest. The yoke is 
naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons, except the 
one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who 
expects to succeed to it. How different are these cases from that 
of the power of men over women ! I am not now prejudging the 
question of its justifiableness. I am showing how vastly more 
permanent it could not but be, even if not justifiable, than these 
other dominations which have nevertheless lasted down to our 
own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is in the 
possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its 
exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but com- 
mon to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its 
supporters, a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the 
political ends usually contended for by factions, of little private 
importance to any but the leaders ; it comes home to the person 
and hearth of every male head of a family, and of every one who 
looks forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to 
exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. 
And the case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest : 
for every one who desires power, desires it most over those who 
are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has 
most concerns in common, and in whom any independence of 
his authority is oftenest likely to interfere with his individual 
preferences. If, in the other cases specified, powers manifestly 
grounded only on force, and having so much less to support them, 
are so slowly and with so much difficulty got rid of, much more 
must it be so with this, even if it rests on no better foundation 
than those. We must consider, too, that the possessors of the 
power have facilities in this case, greater than in any other, to 
prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the subjects 
lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the 
hands, of one of the masters — in closer intimacy with him than 
with any of her fellow-subjects ; with no means of combin- 
ing against him, no power of even locally overmastering him, 



482 JOHN STUART MILL 

and, on the other hand, with the strongest motives for seeking 
his favor and avoiding to give him offense. In struggles for po- 
Htical emancipation, everybody knows how often its champions 
are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the case of 
women, each individual of the subject class is in a chronic state 
of bribery and intimidation combined. In setting up the stand- 
ard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still more of 
the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of the 
pleasures or the alleviations of their own individual lot. If ever 
any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke 
tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, 
this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong system ; but 
every one who is capable of thinking on the subject must see that 
even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of unjust au- 
thority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms still 
exist in many civilized countries, and have only recently been 
got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much 
the deepest rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. 
There is more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies 
against it should have been so numerous and so weighty as they 
are. 

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made be- 
tween the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust 
power which I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are 
arbitrary, and the effect of mere usurpation, while it on the con- 
trary is natural. But was there ever any domination which did 
not appear natural to those who possessed it ? There was a time 
when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of 
masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most 
cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition 
of the human race. No less an intellect, and one which contrib- 
uted no less to the progress of human thought, than Aristotle, 
held this opinion without doubt or misgiving ; and rested it on 
the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the 
dominion of men over women is usually based, namely, that there 
are different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave 



« 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 483 

natures ; that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian 
races of Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need 
I go back to Aristotle ? Did not the slave owners of the south- 
ern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanat- 
icism with which men cling to the theories that justify their 
passions and legitimate their personal interests ? Did they not 
call heaven and earth to witness that the dominion of the white 
man over the black is natural, that the black race is by nature 
incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery ? — some even 
going so far as to say that the freedom of manual laborers is an 
unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the theorists of ab- 
solute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only natural 
form of government ; issuing from the patriarchal, which was 
the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the 
model of the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as 
they contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for that 
matter, the law of force itself, to those who could not plead any 
other, has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the 
exercise of authority. Conquering races hold it to be nature's 
own dictate that the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, 
as they euphoniously paraphrase it, that the feebler and more 
unwarlike races should submit to the braver and manlier. The 
smallest acquaintance with human life in the Middle Ages shows 
how supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility over 
men of low condition appeared to the nobility themselves, and 
how unnatural the conception seemed of a person of the inferior 
class claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over 
them. It hardly seemed less so to the class held in subjection. 
The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in their most vigorous 
struggles, never made any pretension to a share of authority; 
they only demanded more or less limitation to the power of 
tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural generally 
means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual 
appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a uni- 
versal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears 
unnatural. But how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is 



484 JOHN STUART MILL 

dependent on custom, appears by ample experience. Nothing 
so much astonishes the people of distant parts of the worid, when 
they first learn anything about England, as to be told that it is 
under a queen ; the thing seems to them so unnatural as to be 
almost incredible. To Enghshmen this does not seem in the 
least degree unnatural, because they are used to it ; but they do 
feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or members of 
Parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war and politics 
were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual ; it 
seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be 
of manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to 
their husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed 
rather less unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on 
account of the fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be his- 
torical), and the partial example afforded by the Spartan women ; 
who, though no less subordinate by law than in other Greek 
states, were more free in fact ; and being trained to bodily exer- 
cises in the same manner with men, gave ample proof that they 
were not naturally disqualified for them. There can be little 
doubt that Spartan experience suggested to Plato, among many 
other of his doctrines, that of the social and political equality of 
the two sexes. 

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all 
these others in not being a rule of force : it is accepted voluntarily ; 
women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In 
the first place, a great number of women do not accept it. Ever 
since there have been women able to make their sentiments 
known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which so- 
ciety permits to them), an increasing number of them have 
recorded protests against their present social condition : and re- 
cently many thousands of them, headed by the most eminent 
women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament for 
their admission to the Parliamentary suffrage. The claim of 
women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of 
knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a 
great prospect of success ; while the demand for their admission 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 485 

into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, 
becomes every year more urgent. Though there are not in this 
country, as there are in the United States, periodical conventions 
and an organized party to agitate for the rights of women, there 
is a numerous and active society organized and managed by 
women, for the more limited object of obtaining the political 
franchise. Nor is it only in our own country and in America 
that women are beginning to protest, more or less collectively, 
against the disabilities under which they labor. France, and 
Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now afford examples of the 
same thing. How many more women there are who silently 
cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know ; but there 
are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were they 
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the 
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no 
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When 
Simon de Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit 
for the first time in Parliament, did any of them dream of de- 
manding that an assembly, elected by their constituents, should 
make and destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of 
state ? No such thought entered into the imagination of the 
most ambitious of them. The nobility had already these pre- 
tensions ; the commons pretended to nothing but to be exempt 
from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual oppres- 
sion of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature that 
those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by 
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exer- 
cise. There is never any want of women who complain of ill 
usage by their husbands. There would be infinitely more, if 
complaint were not the greatest of all provocatives to a repeti- 
tion and increase of the ill usage. It is this which frustrates all 
attempts to maintain the power but protect the woman against 
its abuses. In no other case (except that of a child) is the person 
who has been proved judicially to have suffered an injury, re- 
placed under the physical power of the culprit who inflicted it. 
Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and protracted 



486 JOHN STUART MILL 

cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare avail themselves of the 
laws made for their protection ; and if, in a moment of irrepressible 
indignation, or by the interference of neighbors, they are induced 
to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to disclose as little as they 
can, and to beg off their tyrant from his merited chastisement. 

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely 
that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. 
They are so far in a position different from all other subject 
classes, that their masters require something more from them 
than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of 
women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most 
brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with 
them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, 
but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in prac- 
tice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, 
for maintaining obedience, on fear, — either fear of themselves, 
or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than 
simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education 
to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very 
earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the 
very opposite to that of men ; not self-will and government by 
self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. 
All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all 
the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for 
others, to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have 
no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant 
the only ones they are allowed to have — those to the men with 
whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an 
additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When 
we put together three things — first, the natural attraction be- 
tween opposite sexes ; secondly, the wife's entire dependence on 
the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his 
gift, or depending entirely on his will ; and lastly, that the princi- 
pal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of so- 
cial ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only 
through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 487 

attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine 
education and formation of character. And this great means of 
influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an in- 
stinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost 
as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to 
them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual 
will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual at- 
tractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes 
which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have sub- 
sisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been as 
sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it ? If it had been 
made the object of the life of every young plebeian to find per- 
sonal favor in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with 
some seigneur ; if domestication with him, and a share of his 
personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all 
should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to 
reckon on the most desirable prizes ; and if, when this prize had 
been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all 
interests not centering in him, all feelings and desires but those 
which he shared or inculcated ; would not serfs and seigneurs, 
plebeians and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at 
this day as men and women are? And would not all but a 
thinker here and there have believed the distinction to be a 
fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature? 

The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that 
custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no pre- 
sumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favor of the 
arrangements which place women in social and political subjec- 
tion to men. But I may go further, and maintain that the 
course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human so- 
ciety, afford not only no presumption in favor of this system of 
inequality of rights, but a strong one against it ; and that, so far 
as the whole course of human improvement up to this time, the 
whole stream of modern tendencies, warrants any inference on 
the subject, it is, that this relic of the past is discordant with the 
future, and must necessarily disappear. 



488 JOHN STUART MILL 



For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world — the 
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, mod 
em social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past ? 
It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, 
and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are 
born to, but are free to employ their facilities, and such favorable 
chances as ofifer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them 
most desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very 
different principle. All were bom to a fixed social position, and 
were mostly kept in it by law, or interdicted from any means by 
which they could emerge from it. As some men are born white 
and others black, so some were born slaves and others freemen 
and citizens ; some were born patricians, others plebeians ; some 
were born feudal nobles, others commoners and roturiers} A 
slave or serf could never make himself free, nor, except by the 
will of his master, become so. In most European countries it 
was not till towards the close of the Middle Ages, and as a conse- 
quence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could be 
ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the ex- 
clusive heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed 
before it was fully established that the father could disinherit 
him. Among the industrious classes, only those who were born 
members of a guild, or were admitted into it by its members, 
could lawfully practice their calling within its local limits ; and 
nobody could practice any calling deemed important in any 
but the legal manner — by processes authoritatively prescribed. 
Manufacturers have stood in the pillory for presuming to carry 
on their business by new and improved methods. In modern 
Europe, and most in those parts of it which have participated 
most largely in all other modern improvements, diametrically 
opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do not 
undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial opera- 
tion shall or shall not be conducted, or what modes of conduct- 
ing them shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfet- 
tered choice of individuals. Even the laws which required that 
1 Plebeians. — Editors. 



,' 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 489 

workmen should serve an apprenticeship, have in this country 
been repealed : there being ample assurance that in all cases 
in which an apprenticeship is necessary, its necessity will suf- 
fice to enforce it. The old theory was, that the least possible 
should be left to the choice of the individual agent ; that all he 
had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by 
superior wisdom. Left to himself he was sure to go wrong. The 
modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, 
is, that things in which the individual is the person directly in- 
terested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion ; 
and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect 
the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous. This conclusion, 
slowly arrived at, and not adopted until almost every possible 
application of the contrary theory had been made with disastrous 
result, now (in the industrial department) prevails universally in 
the most advanced countries, almost universally in all that have 
pretensions to any sort of advancement. It is not that all pro- 
cesses are supposed to be equally good, or all persons to be equally 
qualified for everything ; but that freedom of individual choice 
is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption 
of the best processes, and throws each operation into the hands 
of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it nec- 
essary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a 
blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make black- 
smiths strong-armed men, because the weak-armed can earn 
more by engaging in occupations for which they are more fit. In 
consonance with this doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping 
of the proper bounds of authority to fix beforehand, on some 
general presumption, that certain persons are not fit to do cer- 
tain things. It is now thoroughly known and admitted that if 
some such presumptions exist, no such presumption is infallible. 
Even if it be well grounded in a majority of cases, which it is very 
likely not to be, there will be a minority of exceptional cases in 
which it does not hold : and in those it is both an injustice to the 
individuals, and a detriment to society, to place barriers in the 
way of their using their faculties for their own benefit and for that 



490 JOHN STUART MILL 

of others. In the cases, on the other hand, in which the unfit- 
ness is real, the ordinary motives of human conduct will on the 
whole suflEice to prevent the incompetent person from making, 
or from persisting in, the attempt. . 

If this general principle of social and economical science is 
not true ; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from 
the opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than 
the law and the government, of their own capacities and voca- 
tion ; the world cannot too soon abandon this principle, and re- 
turn to the old system of regulations and disabilities. But if 
the principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it, and not 
to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than 
to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a 
nobleman, shall decide the person's position through all life — 
shall interdict people from all the more elevated social positions, 
and from all, except a few, respectable occupations. Even were 
we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended as to the superior 
fitness of men for all the functions now reserved to them, the 
same argument applies which forbids a legal qualification for 
members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen years the condi- 
tions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a real loss, while 
the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no gain ; for if the 
constitution of the electoral body disposes them to choose unfit 
persons, there are always plenty of such persons to choose from. 
In all things of any difficulty and importance, those who can do 
them well are fewer than the need, even with the most unre- 
stricted latitude of choice ; and any limitation of the field of se- 
lection deprives society of some chances of being served by the 
competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent. 

At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of 
women are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions 
take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all 
their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one 
exception is that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne ; 
no one, not of the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one 
even of that family can, by any means but the course of heredi- 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 491 

tary succession, attain it. All other dignities and social advan- 
tages are open to the whole male sex ; many indeed are only at- 
tainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven for by any one, 
and is actually obtained by many men of the very humblest 
origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are indeed insuperable 
without the aid of fortunate accidents ; but no male human being 
is under any legal ban ; neither law nor opinion superadd ar- 
tificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have said, is 
excepted ; but in this case every one feels it to be an exception — 
an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to its cus- 
toms and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary spe- 
cial expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in 
estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But 
in this exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for 
important reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to 
competition, all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to 
the principle from which they nominally derogate ; for they cir- 
cumscribe this high function by conditions avowedly intended to 
prevent the person to whom it ostensibly belongs from really 
performing it ; while the person by whom it is performed, the 
responsible minister, does obtain the post by a competition 
from which no full-grown citizen of the male sex is legally ex- 
cluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which women are subject 
from the mere fact of their birth, are the solitary examples of the 
kind in modern legislation. In no instance except this, which 
comprehends half the human race, are the higher social functions 
closed against any one by a fatality of birth which no exertions, 
and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for even reli- 
gious disabilities (besides that in England and in Europe they 
have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career 
to the disqualified person in case of conversion. 

The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated 
fact in modern social institutions ; a solitary breach of what has 
become their fundamental law ; a single relic of an old world of 
thought and practice exploded in everything else, but retained 
in the one thing of most universal interest; as if a gigantic 



492 JOHN STUART MILL 

dolmen, or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympus, occupied the site 
of St. Paul's and received daily worship, while the surrounding 
Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals. 
This entire discrepancy between one social fact and all those 
which accompany it, and the radical opposition between its 
nature and the progressive movement which is the boast of the 
modern world, and which has successively swept away every- 
thing else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a conscien- 
tious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for reflection. 
It raises a prima facie presumption on the unfavorable side, far 
outweighing any which custom and usage could in such circum- 
stances create on the favorable; and should at least suffice to 
make this, like the choice between republicanism and royalty, 
a balanced question. 

The least that can be demanded is, that the question should 
not be considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing 
opinion, but open to discussion on its merits, as a question of 
justice and expediency ; the decision on this, as on any of the 
other social arrangements of maijkind, depending on what an 
enlightened estimate of tendencies and consequences may show 
to be most advantageous to humanity in general, without dis- 
tinction of sex. And the discussion must be a real discussion, 
descending to foundations, and not resting satisfied with vague 
and general assertions. It will not do, for instance, to assert 
in general terms, that the experience of mankind has pronounced 
in favor of the existing system. Experience cannot possibly 
have decided between two courses, so long as there has only 
been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the 
equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered 
that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. 
All that is proved in its favor by direct experience, is that man- 
kind have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of 
improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether 
that prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater, than 
it would have been under the other system, experience does not 
say. On the other hand, experience does say, that every step in 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 493 

improvement has been so invariably accompanied by a step made 
in raising the social position of women, that historians and phi- 
losophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement 
as on the whole the surest test and most correct measure of the 
civilization of a people or an age. Through all the progressive 
period of human history, the condition of women has been ap- 
proaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself 
prove that the assimilation must go on to complete equality; 
but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the case. 
Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two 
sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and 
renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of 
common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny 
that any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, 
as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to 
one another. If men had ever been found in society without 
women, or women without men, or if there had been a society 
of men and women in which the women were not under the 
control of the men, something might have been positively known 
about the mental and moral differences which may be inher- 
ent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of 
women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced 
repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. 
It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of depend- 
ents have had their character so entirely distorted from its 
natural proportions by their relation with their masters ; for, 
if conquered, and slave races have been, in some respects, more 
forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not been crushed down 
by an iron heel has generally been let alone, and if left with any 
liberty of development, it has developed itself according to its 
own laws; but in the case of women, a hothouse and stove 
cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities 
of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters. 
Then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout 
luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated atmos- 
phere and under this active nurture and watering, while other 



494 JOHN STUART MILL 

shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry 
air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted 
growth, and some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, 
with that inability to recognize their own work which distin- 
guishes the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree 
grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it 
would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapor bath and the 
other half in the snow. 

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and 
the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social ar- 
rangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance 
and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which 
form human character. Whatever any portion of the human 
species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a 
natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowl- 
edge of the circumstances in which they have been placed clearly 
points out the causes that made them what they are. Because 
a cotter deeply in arrears to his landlord is not industrious, 
there are people who think that the Irish are naturally idle. 
Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities 
appointed to execute them turn their arms against them, there 
are people who think the French incapable of free government. 
Because the Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only 
plundered the Greeks, there are persons who think that the 
Turks are naturally more sincere: and because women, as is 
often said, care nothing about politics except their personalities, 
it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting 
to women than to men. History, which is now so much better 
understood than formerly, teaches another lesson: if only by 
showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to 
external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its 
manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and 
uniform. But in history, as in traveling, men usually see only 
what they already have in their owij minds ; and few learn much 
from history who do not bring much with them to its study. 

Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 495 

natural differences between the two sexes — a subject on which 
it is impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete 
and correct knowledge — while almost everybody dogmatizes 
upon it, almost all neglect and make light of the only means by 
which any partial insight can be obtained into it. This is, an 
analytic study of the most important department of psychology, 
the laws of the influence of circumstances on character. For, 
however great and apparently ineradicable the moral and intel- 
lectual differences between men and women might be, the evi- 
dence of their being natural differences could only be negative. 
Those only could be inferred to be natural which could not pos- 
sibly be artificial — the residuum, after deducting every char- 
acteristic of either sex which can admit of being explained from 
education or external circumstances. The profoundest knowl- 
edge of the laws of the formation of character is indispensable 
to entitle any one to affirm even that there is any difference, 
much more what the difference is, between the two sexes con- 
sidered as moral and rational beings ; and since no one, as yet, 
has that knowledge (for there is hardly any subject which, in 
proportion to its importance, has been so little studied), no one 
is thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject. 
Conjectures are all that can at present be made; conjectures 
more or less probable, according as more or less authorized by 
such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of psychology, as 
applied to the formation of character. 

Even the preliminary knowledge, what the differences between 
the sexes now are, apart from all question as to how they are 
made what they are, is still in the crudest and most incomplete 
state. Medical practitioners and physiologists have ascertained, 
to some extent, the differences in bodily constitution ; and this is 
an important element to the psychologist ; but hardly any medi- 
cal practitioner is a psychologist. Respecting the mental char- 
acteristics of women, their observations are of no more worth 
than those of common men. It is a subject on which nothing 
final can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, 
women themselves, have given but little testimony, and that 



496 JOHN STUART MILL 

little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid women. 
Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's 
notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which 
prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not 
so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from 
their own nature and faculties. It is only a man here and there 
who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the 
women of his own family. I do not mean, of their capabilities ; 
these nobody knows, not even themselves, because most of them 
have never been called out. I mean their actually existing 
thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks he perfectly under- 
stands women, because he has had amatory relations with several, 
perhaps with many of them. If he is a good observer, and his 
experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may have 
learned something of one narrow department of their nature — 
an important department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, 
few persons are generally more ignorant, because there are few 
from whom it is so carefully hidden. The most favorable case 
which a man can generally have for studying the character of 
a woman, is that of his own wife ; for the opportunities are 
greater, and the cases of complete sympathy not so unspeakably 
rare. And in fact, this is the source from which any knowledge 
worth having on the subject has, I believe, generally come. 
But most men have not had the opportunity of studying in this 
way more than a single case ; accordingly one can, to an almost 
laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like from his opin- 
ions about women in general. To make even this one case 
yield any result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the 
man not only a competent judge, but of a character so sympa- 
thetic in itself, and so well adapted to hers, that he can either 
read her mind by sympathetic intuition, or has nothing in him- 
self which makes her shy of disclosing it. Hardly anything, I 
believe, can be more rare than this conjunction. It often hap- 
pens that there is the most complete unity of feeling and com- 
munity of interests as to all external things, yet the one has as 
little admission into the internal life of the other as if they were 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 497 

common acquaintance. Even with true afifection, authority on 
the one side and subordination on the other prevent perfect 
confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, 
much is not shown. In the analogous relation of parent and 
child, the corresponding phenomenon must have been in the 
observation of every one. As between father and son, how many 
are the cases in which the father, in spite of real affection on 
both sides, obviously to all the world does not know, nor suspect, 
parts of the son's character familiar to his companions and equals. 
The truth is, that the position of looking up to another is ex- 
tremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with 
him. The fear of losing ground in his opinion or in his feelings 
is so strong, that even in an upright character, there is an uncon- 
scious tendency to show only the best side, or the side which, 
though not the best, is that which he most likes to see ; and it 
may be confidently said that thorough knowledge of one another 
hardly ever exists, but between persons who, besides being inti- 
mates, are equals. How much more true, then, must all this be, 
when the one is not only under the authority of the other, but 
has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything else subor- 
dinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor 
feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to him. 
All these difficulties stand in the way of a man's obtaining any 
thorough knowledge even of the one woman whom alone, in 
general, he has sufficient opportunity of studying. When we 
further consider that to understand one woman is not necessarily 
to understand any other woman ; that even if he could study 
many women of one rank, or of one country, he would not thereby 
understand women of other ranks or countries ; and even if he 
did, they are still only the women of a single period of history ; 
we may safely assert that the knowledge which men can acquire 
of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to 
what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, 
and always will be so, until women themselves have told all 
that they have to tell. 
And this time has not come ; nor will it come otherwise than 



498 JOHN STUART MILL 

gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either 
been qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by 
society, to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few 
of them dare tell anything which men, on whom their literary 
success depends, are unwilling to hear. Let us remember in 
what manner, up to a very recent time, the expression, even by 
a male author, of uncustomary opinions, or what are deemed 
eccentric feelings, usually was, and in some degree still is, re- 
ceived ; and we may form some faint conception under what 
impediments a woman, who is brought up to think custom and 
opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in books any- 
thing drawn from the depths of her own nature. The greatest 
woman who has left writings behind her sufficient to give her 
an eminent rank in the literature of her country, thought it 
necessary to prefix as a motto to her boldest work, " Un homme 
pent braver V opinion; une femme doit s^y soumettreJ" ^ The 
greater part of what women write about women is mere syco- 
phancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, much of it 
seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband. 
Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the mark, and 
inculcate a servility beyond what is desired or relished by any 
man, except the very vulgarest. But this is not so often the 
case as, even at a quite late period, it still was. Literary women 
are becoming more free-spoken, and more willing to express their 
real sentiments. Unfortunately, in this country especially, they 
are themselves such artificial products that their sentiments 
are compounded of a small element of individual observation 
and consciousness, and a very large one of acquired associations. 
This will be less and less the case, but it will remain true to a 
great extent, as long as social institutions do not admit the same 
free development of originality in women which is possible to 
men. When that time comes, and not before, we shall see, and 
not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know of the nature 
of women, and the adaptation of other things to it. 

1 A man may defy opinion; a woman must submit to it. — Editors. 
Title-page of Mme. de Stael's Delphine. 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 499 

I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present 
obstruct any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women, 
because in this as in so many other things ^^ opinio copicB inter 
maximas causas inopicE est; " ^ and there is little chance of reason- 
able thinking on the matter, while people flatter themselves 
that they perfectly understand a subject of which most men 
know absolutely nothing, and of which it is at present impossible 
that any man, or all men taken together, should have knowledge 
which can qualify them to lay down the law to women as to what 
is, or is not, their vocation. Happily, no such knowledge is nec- 
essaiy for any practical purpose connected with the position of 
women in relation to society and life. For, according to all the 
principles involved in modern society, the question rests with 
women themselves — to be decided by their own experience, 
and by the use of their own faculties. There are no means of 
finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying 
— and no means by which any one else can discover for them 
what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone. 

One thing we may be certain of — that what is contrary to 
women's nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply 
giving their nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to inter- 
fere in behalf of nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed 
in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. 
What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to 
forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as 
the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to ex- 
clude them from ; since nobody asks for protective duties and 
bounties in favor of women ; it is only asked that the present 
bounties and protective duties in favor of men should be recalled. 
If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than 
for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make 
the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. 
Whatever women's services are most wanted for, the free play 
of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them 
to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are most wanted 

1 Supposed abundance is among the chief causes of want. — Editors. 



500 JOHN STUART MILL 

for the things for which they are most fit ; by the apportionment 
of which to them, the collective faculties of the two sexes can be 
applied on the whole with the greatest sum of valuable result. 

The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural 
vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is 
supposed to be, because, judging from acts — from the whole 
of the present constitution of society — one might infer that 
their opinion was the direct contrary. They might be supposed 
to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was of all 
things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if 
they are free to do anything else — if any other means of living, 
or occupation of their time and faculties, is open, which has 
any chance of appearing desirable to them — there will not be 
enough of them who will be willing to accept the condition said 
to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of men in 
general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I should 
like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is 
already implied in much that is written on the subject) — "It 
is necessary to society that women should marry and produce 
children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. 
Therefore it is necessary to compel them." The merits of the 
case would then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that 
of the slaveholders of South Carolina and Louisiana. "It is 
necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men 
cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which 
we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled." An illus- 
tration still closer to the point is that of impressment. Sailors 
must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens 
that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be 
the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used ! 
and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been 
successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort — First 
pay the sailors the honest value of their labor. When you have 
made it as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for 
other employers, you will have no more difficulty than others 
have in obtaining their services. To this there is no logical 



THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 501 

answer except "I will not:" and as people are now not only 
ashamed, but are not desirous, to rob the laborer of his hire, 
impressment is no longer advocated. Those who attempt to 
force women into marriage by closing all other doors against 
them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean 
what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that men do 
not render the married condition so desirable to women as to 
induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is 
not a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive 
when one allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And 
here, I believe, is the clew to the feelings of those men who have 
a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they 
are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I 
do not think that any one in reality has that apprehension ; but 
lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal condi- 
tions ; lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing 
almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather 
than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a master, and 
a master too of all their earthly possessions. And truly, if this 
consequence were necessarily incident to marriage, I think 
that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in 
thinking it probable that few women, capable of anything else, 
would, unless under an irresistible entrainement,^ rendering them 
for the time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, 
when any other means were open to them of filling a convention- 
ally honorable place in life : and if men are determined that the 
law of marriage shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, 
in point of mere policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's 
choice. But, in that case, all that has been done in the modern 
world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a mis- 
take. They never should have been allowed to receive a literary 
education. Women who read, much more women who write, are, 
in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a dis- 
turbing element : and it was wrong to bring women up with any 
acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a domestic servant. 
^ Impulse. — Editors. 



XVIII 

THE FUTURE OF WOMAN i 
Frederic Harrison 

[Frederic Harrison (183 1-) is one of the last survivors of a notable 
generation of critics and men of letters of the late nineteenth century. 
Throughout his long life Mr. Harrison has written much on general litera- 
ture, history, biography, philosophy, rehgion, education, and political and 
economic science. He has also been prominent as a jurist, and has taken 
an active part in the political and social affairs of England, where he has 
done much for the practical advancement of progressive opinions. 

Mr. Harrison's political views, however, do not extend to the support of 
woman suffrage, although he regards the question as a very burning one, 
and the continued agitation over it "charged with tremendous consequences, 
political, social, and moral." His opinions on the subject of the rights, 
duties, and claims of women are contained in four essays, printed in his 
volume Realities and Ideals (igo8). The introductory essay of this group 
has been chosen as an able presentation^ of some of the fundamental argu- 
ments often urged by opponents of woman suffrage. Mr. Harrison makes 
no apology for male tyranny now or in the past and admits that many legal 
and social changes are needed for woman's best development ; but he argues 
that to break down the barriers that tend to distinguish the life of woman 
from that of man would be to shake the foundations of all family life and 
bring disaster to civilization. An earlier statement of these opinions, and 
especially interesting here, is Mr. Harrison's analysis and refutation of the 
claims of Mill's Subjection of Women in his volume Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, 
and other Literary Estimates (1900), pp. 289-297.] 

The system of thought on which this entire series of essays 
is based seeks to moraHze and to spiritualize the great insti- 
tutions of society — not to revolutionize or to materialize them. 
In nothing is this character more conspicuous than in its teach- 

^ Reprinted by permission of The Macmillan Company, from Realities and 
Ideals, by Frederic Harrison. 

502 




THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 503 

ing as to the social Future of Woman. It is intensely conserva- 
tive as to the distinctive quality with which civilization has 
ever invested women, whilst it is ardently progressive in its 
aim to purify and spiritualize the social function of women. It 
holds firmly the middle ground between the base apathy which 
is satisfied with the actual condition of woman as it is, and the 
restless materialism which would assimilate, as far as possible, 
the distinctive functions of women to those of men, which would 
"equalize the sexes" in the spirit of justice, as they phrase it, 
and would pulverize the social groups of families, sexes, and 
professions into individuals organized, if at all, by unlimited 
resort to the ballot box. Herein we are truly conservative in 
holding society to be made up of families, not of individuals, 
and in developing, not in annihilating, the differences of sex, 
age, and relation between individuals. 

But first, let us get rid of the unworthy suspicion that we are 
content with the condition of women as we see it, even in the 
advanced populations of the West to-day. As M. Laffitte has 
so well put it, the "test of civilization is the place which it as- 
signs to women." In a rudimentary state we find women treated 
with brutal oppression, little better than slaves or beasts of 
burden, where the conditions of existence make such tasks al- 
most a cruel necessity for all. In many societies of a high civili- 
zation, from the point of view of intellectual activity or military 
organization, the condition of women is often found to be one 
of seclusion, neglect, or humiliation, moral, physical, and intel- 
lectual. Even to-day, under the most favorable conditions — 
conditions, perhaps, more often found in some sections of the 
laboring classes of cities rather than amongst the spoiled daugh- 
ters of wealth and power — it is shocking to see how backward 
is the education of women as a sex, how much their lives are 
overburdened by labor, anxiety, and unwomanly fatigues, by 
frivolous excitement and undue domestic responsibility, by the 
fever of public ambitions and cynical defiance of all womanly 
ideals. 

No ! we can never rest satisfied with the current prejudice 



504 FREDERIC HARRISON 

that assigns to woman, even to those with ample leisure and 
resources, an education different in kind and degree and avow- 
edly inferior to that of men, which supposes that even a superior 
education for girls should be limited to moderate knowledge 
of a few modern languages, and a few elegant accomplishments. 
This truly Mohammedan or Hindu view of woman's education 
is no longer openly avowed by cultured people of our own gen- 
eration. But it is too obviously still the practice in fact through- 
out the whole Western world, even for nine tenths of the rich. 
And as to the education which is officially provided for the poor, 
it is in this country, at least, almost too slight to deserve the 
name at all. For this most dreadful neglect let us call aloud 
for radical relief. We call aloud for an education for women in 
the same line as that of men, to be given by the same teachers, 
and covering the same ground, though not at all necessarily to 
be worked out in common or in the same form and with the 
same practical detail. It must be an education, essentially in 
scientific basis the same as that of men, conducted by the same, 
and those the best attainable, instructors — an education cer- 
tainly not inferior, rather superior to that of men, inasmuch as 
it can easily be freed from the drudgery incidental to the prac- 
tice of special trades, and also because it is adapted to the more 
sympathetic, more alert, more tractable, more imaginative in- 
telligence of women. 

So, also, we look to the good feeling of the future to relieve 
women from the agonizing wear and tear of families far too 
large to be reared by one mother' — a burden which crushes 
down the best years of life for so many mothers, sisters, and 
daughters — a burden which, whilst it exists, makes all expec- 
tation of superior education or greater moral elevation in the 
masses of women mere idle talk — a burden which would never 
be borne at all, were it not that the cry of the market for more 
child labor produces an artificial bounty on excessively large 
families. And to the future we look to set women free from 
the crushing factory labor which is the real slave trade of the 
nineteenth century, one of the most retrograde changes in social 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 505 

order ever, made since Feudalism and Church together extin- 
guished the slavery of the ancient world. In many ways this 
slavery of modern Industrialism is quite as demoralizing to men 
and women, and in some ways as injurious to society, as ever 
was the mitigated slavery of the Roman Empire, though its 
evils are not quite so startling and so cruel. 

These are the wants which, in our eyes, press with greatest 
urgency on the conditions of women, and not their admission 
to all the severe labors and engrossing professions of men, the 
assimilation of the life of women to the life of men, and espe- 
cially to a share in all public duties and privileges. The root 
of the matter is that the social function of women is essentially 
and increasingly different from that of men. What is this 
function ? It is personal, direct, domestic ; working rather 
through sympathy than through action, equally intellectual 
as that of men, but acting more through the imagination, and 
less through logic. We start from this — neither exaggerating 
the difference, nor denying it, but resting in the organic differ- 
ence between woman and man. It is proved by all sound 
biology, by the biology both of man and of the entire animal 
series. It is proved also by the history of civilization, and the 
entire course of human evolution. It is brought home to us 
every hour of the day, by the instinctive practice of every 
family. And it is illustrated and idealized by the noblest 
poetry of the world, whether it be the great epics of the past or 
the sum of njodern romance. 

It is a difference of nature, I say, an organic difference, alike 
in body, in mind, in feeling, and in character — a difference 
which it is the part of evolution to develop and not to destroy, 
as it is always the part of evolution to develop organic differ- 
ences and not to produce their artificial assimilation. A dif- 
ference, as I have said ; but not a scale of superiority or inferior- 
ity. No theory more than ours repudiates the brutal egoism 
of past ages, and of too many present men of the world, which 
classes women as the inferiors of men, and the cheap sophistry 
of the vicious and the overbearing that the part of women in 



5o6 FREDERIC HARRISON 

the life of humanity is a lower, a less intellectual, or less active 
part. Such a view is the refuge of coarse natures and stunted 
brains. Who can say whether it is nobler to be husband or to 
be wife, to be mother or to be son ? Is it more blessed to love 
or to be loved, to form a character or to write a poem ? Enough 
of these idle conundrums, which are as cynical as they are sense- 
less. Everything depends on how the part is played, how near 
each one of us comes to the higher ideal — how our Hf e is worked 
out, not whether we be born man or woman, in the first half of 
the century or in the second. The thing which concerns us is 
to hold fast by the organic difference implanted by Nature be- 
tween Man and Woman, in body, in mind, in feeling, and in 
energy, without any balancing of higher and lower, of better or 
of worse. 

Fully to work out the whole meaning of this difference in all its 
details, would involve a complete analysis in Anthropology and 
Ethics, and nothing but the bare heads of the subject can here be 
noticed. It begins with the difference in physical organization — 
the condition, and, no doubt in one sense, the antecedent (I do 
not say the cause) of every other difference. The physical organ- 
ization of women differs from that of men in many ways : it is 
more rapidly matured, and yet, possibly, more viable (as the 
French say), more likely to live, and to live longer; it is more 
delicate, in all senses of the word, more sympathetic, more elastic, 
more liable to shock and to change ; it is obviously less in weight, 
in mass, in physical force, but above all in muscular persistence. 
It is not true to say that the feminine organization is, on the 
whole, weaker, because there are certain forms of fatigue, such as 
those of nursing the sick or the infant, minute care of domestic 
details, ability to resist the wear and tear of anxiety on the body, 
in which women certainly at present surpass men. 

But there is one feature in the feminine organization which, 
for industrial and political purposes, is more important than 
all. It is subject to functional interruption absolutely incom- 
patible with the highest forms of continuous pressure. With 
mothers, this interruption amounts to seasons of prostration 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 507 

during many of the best years of life; with all women (but a 
small exception not worth considering) it involves some inter- 
ruption to the maximum working capacity. A perfectly healthy 
man works from childhood to old age, marries and brings up a 
family of children, without knowing one hour of any one day 
when he was not "quite fit." No woman could say the same; 
and of course no mother could deny that for months she had 
been a simple invalid. Now, for all the really severe strains of 
industrial, professional, and public careers, the first condition 
of success is the power to endure long continuous pressure at 
the highest point, without the risk of sudden collapse, even for 
an hour. 

Supposing all other forces equal, it is just the five per cent of 
periodical unfitness which makes the whole difference between 
the working capacity of the sexes. Imagine an army in the 
field or a fleet at sea, composed of women. In the course of 
nature, on the day of battle or in storm, a percentage of every 
regiment and of every crew would be in childbed, and a much 
larger percentage would be, if not in hospital, below the mark 
or liable to contract severe disease if subject to the strain of 
battle or storm. Of course it will be said that civil life is not 
war, and that mothers are not intended to take part. But all 
women may become mothers ; and though industry, the profes- 
sions, and politics are not war, they call forth qualities of en- 
durance, readiness, and indomitable vigor quite as truly as 
war. 

Either the theory of opening all occupations to women means 
opening them to an unsexed minority of women, or it means a 
diminution and speedy end to the human race, or it means that 
the severer occupations are to be carried on in a fashion far 
more desultory and amateurish than ever has yet been known. 
It is owing to a very natural shrinking from hard facts, and a 
somewhat misplaced conventionality, that this fundamental 
point has been kept out of sight, whilst androgynous ignorance 
has gone about claiming for women a life of toil, pain, and 
danger, for which every husband, every biologist, every physi- 



5o8 FREDERIC HARRISON 

cian, every mother — every true woman — knows that women 
are, by the law of nature, unfit. 

This is, as I said, merely a preliminary part of the question. 
It is decisive and fundamental, no doubt, and it lies at the root 
of the matter. It is a plain organic fact, that ought to be 
treated frankly, and which I have touched on as an incident 
only but with entire directness. But I feel it to be, after all, a 
material, and not an intellectual or spiritual ground, and to 
belong to the lower aspects of the question. We must notice 
it, for it cannot be disregarded ; but it is by no means the heart 
of the matter. The heart of the matter is the greater power of 
affection in Woman, or, it is better to say, the greater degree 
in which the nature of Woman is stimulated and controlled by 
affection. It is a stigma on our generation that so obvious a 
commonplace should need one word to support it. Happily 
there is one trait in humanity which the most cynical sophistry 
has hardly ventured to belittle — the devotion of the mother to 
her offspring. 

This is the universal and paramount aspect of the matter. 
For the life of every man and woman now alive, or that ever 
lived, has depended on the mother's love, or that of some 
woman who played a mother's part. It is a fact so transcendent 
that we are wont to call it an animal instinct. It is, however, 
the central and most perfect form of human feeling. It is 
possessed by all women : it is the dominant instinct of all 
women ; it possesses women, whether mothers or not, from the 
cradle to the grave. The most degraded woman is in this 
superior to the most heroic man (abnormal cases apart). It is 
the earliest, most organic, most universal of all the innate forces 
of mankind. And it still remains the supreme glory of Hu- 
manity. In this central feature of human nature, Women are 
always and everywhere incontestably preeminent. And round 
this central figure of human nature, all human civilization is, 
and ought to be organized; and to perfecting it all human in- 
stitutions do and ought to converge. 

I am very far from limiting this glorious part of maternity 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 509 

in woman to the breeding and nurture of infants; nor do I 
mean to concentrate civilization on the propagation of the hu- 
man species. I have taken the mother's care for the infant as 
the most conspicuous and fundamental part of the whole. But 
this is simply a type of the affection which in all its forms 
woman is perpetually offering to man and to woman — to the 
weak, the suffering, the careworn, the vicious, the dull, and 
the overburdened, as mother, as wife, as sister, as daughter, 
as friend, as nurse, as teacher, as servant, as counselor, as 
purifier, as example, in a word — as woman. The true func- 
tion of woman is to educate, not children only, but men, to 
train to a higher civilization, not the rising generation, but the 
actual society. And to do this by diffusing the spirit of affec- 
tion, of self-restraint, self-sacrifice, fidelity, and purity. And 
this is to be effected, not by writing books about these things 
in the closet, nor by preaching sermons about them in the con- 
gregation, but by manifesting them hour by hour in each home 
by the magic of the voice, look, word, and all the incommuni- 
cable graces of woman's tenderness. 

All this has become so completely a commonplace that the 
very repeating it sounds almost like a jest. But it has to be 
repeated now that coarse sophistry has begun, not only to for- 
get it, but to deny it. And we will repeat it ; for we have 
nothing to add to all that has been said on this cardinal fact 
of human nature by poets, from Homer to Tennyson, by mor- 
alists and preachers, by common sense and pure minds, since 
the world began. We have nothing to add to it save this — 
which, perhaps, is really important — that this function of 
woman, the purifying, spiritualizing, humanizing of society, by 
humanizing each family and by influencing every husband, 
father, son, or brother, in daily contact and in unspoken lan- 
guage, is itself the highest of all human functions, and is nobler 
than anything which art, philosophy, genius, or statesman- 
ship can produce. 

The spontaneous and inexhaustible fountain of love, the 
secret springs whereof are the mystery of womanhood, this is 



5IO FREDERIC HARRISON 

indeed the grand and central difference between the sexes. 
But the difference of function is quite as real, if less in degree, 
when we regard the intellect and the character. Plainly, the 
intellect of women on the whole is more early mature, more 
rapid, more delicate, more agile than that of men ; more im- 
aginative, more in touch with emotion, more sensitive, more 
individual, more teachable, whilst it is less capable of prolonged 
tension, of intense abstraction, of wide range, and of extraordi- 
nary complication. It may be that this is resolvable into the 
obvious fact of smaller cerebral masses and less nervous energy, 
rather than any inferiority of quality. 

The fact remains that no woman has ever approached Aris- 
totle and Archimedes, Shakespeare and Descartes, Raphael and 
Mozart, or has ever shown even a kindred sum of powers. On 
the other hand, not one man in ten can compare with average 
woman in tact, subtlety of observation, in refinement of mental 
habit, in rapidity, agility, and sympathetic touch. To ask 
whether the occasional outbursts of supreme genius in the male 
sex are higher than the almost universal quickness and fineness 
of mind in the female sex, is to ask an idle question. To expel 
either out of human nature would be to arrest civilization and 
to plunge us into barbarism. And the earliest steps out of 
barbarism would have to begin again in each wigwam with the 
quick observation and the flexible mind, and not with the pro- 
found genius. 

As with the intellect — so with the powers of action. The 
character or energy of women is very different from that of men ; 
though here again it is impossible to say which is the superior, 
and far less easy to make the contrast. Certainly the world 
has never seen a female Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, 
or Cromwell. And in mass, endurance, intensity, variety, and 
majesty of will no women ever approach the greatest men, and 
no doubt from the same reason, smaller cerebral mass and slighter 
nervous organization. Yet in qualities of copstant movement, 
in perseverance, in passive endurance, in rapidity of change, in 
keenness of pursuit (up to a certain range and within a given 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 511 

time), in adaptability, agility, and elasticity of nature, in in- 
dustriousness, in love of creating rather than destroying, of 
being busy rather than idle, of dealing with the minutest sur- 
roundings of comfort, grace, and convenience, it is a common- 
place to acknowledge women to be our superiors. And if a 
million housewives do not equal one Caesar, they no doubt add 
more to the happiness of their own generation. 

We come back to this — that in body, in mind, in feeling, 
in character, women are by nature designed to play a different 
part from men. And all these differences combine to point 
to a part personal not general, domestic not public, working 
by direct contact, not by remote suggestion, through the imag- 
ination more than through the reason, by the heart more than 
by the head. There is in women a like intelligence, activity, 
passion ; like and coordinate, but not identical ; equally valu- 
able, but not equal by measure ; and this all works best in the 
Home. That is to say, the sphere in which women act at their 
highest is the Family, and the side where they are the strongest 
is Affection. The sphere where men act at their highest is in 
public, in industry, in the service to the State; and the side 
where men are at their strongest is Activity. Intelligence is 
common to both, capable in men of more sustained strain, apt 
in women for more delicate and mobile service. That is to 
say, the normal and natural work of women is by personal influ- 
ence within the Home. 

All this is so obvious, it has been so completely the universal 
and instinctive practice of mankind since civilization began, 
that to repeat it would be wearisome if the modern spirit of 
social anarchy were not eager to throw it all aside. And we 
have only to repeat the old saws on the matter, together with 
this — that such a part is the noblest which civilization can con- 
fer, and was never more urgently needed than it is to-day. In 
accepting it graciously and in filling it worthily, women are 
placing themselves as a true spiritual force in the vanguard of 
human evolution, and are performing the holiest and most 
beautiful of all duties which Humanity has reserved for her 



512 FREDERIC HARRISON 

best-beloved children. The source of the outcry we hear for 
the Emancipation of Women — their emancipation from their 
noblest duty — is that in this materialist age men are prone to 
despise what is pure, lofty, and tender, and to exalt what is 
coarse, vulgar, and vainglorious. 

When we say that we would see the typical work of woman 
centered in her personal influence in the Home, we are not asking 
for arbitrary and rigid limitations. We are not calHng out for 
any new legislation or urging public opinion to close any womanly 
employment for women. There are a thousand ways in which 
the activity of women may be of peculiar value to the com- 
munity, and many of these necessarily carry women outside 
their own houses and into more or less public institutions. The 
practice of the ladies connected with our Church alone would 
satisfy us how great is the part which women have to play in 
teaching, in directing moral and social institutions, in organizing 
the higher standard of opinion, in inspiring enthusiasm in young 
and old. We are heartily with such invaluable work ; and we 
find that modern civilization offers to women as many careers 
as it offers to men. 

All that we ask is that such work and such careers shall be 
founded on womanly ideals, and shall recognize the essential 
difference in the social functions of men and women. We 
know that in a disorganized condition of society there are ter- 
rible accumulations of exceptional and distressing personal 
hardship. Of course millions of women have, and can have, 
no husbands; hundreds of thousands have no parents, no 
brother, no true family. No one pretends that society is 
without abundant room for unmarried women, and has not a 
mass of work for women who by circumstances have been de- 
prived of their natural family and are without any normal 
home. Many of such women we know to be amongst the no- 
blest of their sex, the very salt of the earth. But their activity 
still retains its homelike beauty, and is still womanly and not 
mannish. All that we ask is that women, whether married or 
unmarried, whether with families of their own or not, shall 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 513 

never cease to feel like women, to work as women should, to 
make us all feel that they are true women amongst us and not 
imitation men. 

We are not now discussing any practical remedy for a tem- 
porary dififtculty; we are only seeking to assert a paramount 
law of human nature. We are defending the principle of the 
womanhness of woman against the anarchic assertors of the 
manliness of woman. There is a passionate party of so-called 
reformers, both men and women, who are crying out for absolute 
assimilation as a principle ; and such is the weakness of politi- 
cians and leaders that this coarse and ignorant sophism is be- 
coming a sort of badge of Radical energy and freedom from 
prejudice. With all practical remedies for admitted social 
diseases we are ever ready to sympathize. In the name of 
mercy let us all do our best with the practical dilemmas which 
society throws up. But let us not attempt to cure them by pull- 
ing society down from its foundations and uprooting the very 
first ideas of social order. Exceptions and painful cases we 
have by the thousand. Let us struggle to help or to mend them, 
as exceptions, and not commit the folly of asserting that the 
exception is the rule. 

We all know that there are more women in these kingdoms 
than men, and not a little perplexity arises therefrom. But 
since more males are born than females, the inequaht}^ is the 
result of abnormal causes — the emigration, wandering habits, 
dangerous trades, overwork, and intemperance of men. There 
are other countries, especially across the Ocean, where the men 
greatly outnumber the women. It is the first and most urgent 
duty of society to remedy this social disease, and not to turn 
society upside down in order to palliate a temporary and a 
local want. Certainly not, when the so-called remedy can only 
increase the disease by "debasing the moral currency" and 
desecrating the noblest duties of woman. Certainly, no re- 
formers whatever can be more eager than we are to do our best 
to help in any reasonable remedy for our social maladies, be 
they what they may. But the extent and acuteness of social 



514 FREDERIC HARRISON 

maladies make us only more anxious to defend the first prin- 
ciples of human society — and to us none is so sacred as the 
inherent and inalienable womanliness of all women's work. 

The prevalent sophistry calls out for complete freedom to 
every individual, male or female, and the abolition of all re- 
straints, legal, conventional, or customary, which prevent 
any adult from living his or her own life at his and her private 
will. It is specious; but, except in an age of Nihilism, such 
anarchic cries would never be heard. It involves the destruc- 
tion of every social institution together. The Family, the State, 
the Church, the Nation, Industry, social organization, law, — all 
rest on fixed rules, which are the standing contradiction of this 
claim of universal personal liberty from restraint. Society im- 
plies the control of absolute individual license ; and this is a claim 
for absolute individual license. It is perfectly easy to find objec- 
tions and personal hardship in every example of social institution. 

Begin with marriage. Many married people would be hap- 
pier and, perhaps, more useful, if they could separate at will. 
Therefore (the cry is), let all men and women be always free to 
live together or apart, when they choose, and as long as they 
choose, without priests, registrars, law courts, or scandal. Many 
parents are unworthy to bring up their children. Therefore, 
let no parent have any control over his child. Many women 
would be more at ease and perhaps more able to work in their 
own way, if they wore men's clothes. And some men, among 
the old and the delicate, might be more comfortable in skirts. 
Therefore, abolish the foolish restrictions about Male and 
Female dress. And this our reformers, it seems, are preparing 
to do. Many men and more women are, at twenty, better 
fitted to "come of age" than some men at thirty. Therefore, 
let every one "come of age" when he or she thinks fit. Many 
a man who, through hunger, steals a turnip is an angel of light 
compared with a millionaire who speculates. Therefore, abolish 
all laws against stealing. Many a foreigner living in England 
knows far more of politics than most native electors. There- 
fore, abolish all restrictions applying to "aliens" as such. 






THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 515 

Many a layman can preach a better sermon than most priests, 
can cure disease better than some doctors, can argue a case 
better than certain barristers, could keep deposits better than 
some bankers, find a thief quicker than most poHcemen, and 
drive a "hansom" better than some cabmen. Therefore — it 
is argued — let every man, woman, and child live with whomso- 
ever he or she like, wear breeches or petticoats as he or she pre- 
fer, put their vote in a ballot box whenever they see one at 
hand, conduct divine service, treat the sick, plead causes, coin 
money, carry letters, drive cabs, and arrest their neighbors, as 
they like, and as long as they like, and so far as they can get 
others to consent. And thus we shall get rid of all personal 
hardships, all restrictions as to age, sex, and competence, and 
all public registration ; we shall abolish monopolies, male tyr- 
anny, and social oppression generally. 

The claim for the complete "emancipation" of women stands 
or falls along with these other examples of emancipation. And 
the answer to it is the same. The restriction, which in a few 
cases is needless, hard, even unjust, is of infinite social useful- 
ness in the vast majority of cases, and "to free" the few would 
be to inflict permanent injury on the mass. To make marriage 
a mere arrangement of two persons at will would be to introduce 
a subtle source of misery into every home. To leave women 
free to go about in men's clothes and men free to adopt women's 
clothes, would be to introduce unimaginable coaresness, vice, 
and brutalization. To leave every one free to fill any public 
office, with or without public guarantee or professional training, 
would open the door to continual fraud, imposture, disputes, 
uncertainty, and confusion. It is to prevent all these evils 
that monopolies, laws, conventions, registers, and other restric- 
tions on personal license exist. And the first and most funda- 
mental of all these restrictions are those which distinguish the 
life of women from that of men. 

Not very many reformers consciously intend the "emanci- 
pation" of women to go as far as this. There is a great deal 
of playing with the question, more or less honest, more or less 



5i6 FREDERIC HARRISON 

serious, as there is much playing with Socialism, Agnosticism, 
and so forth, by people who perhaps, in their hearts, merely 
wish to see women more active and better taught, or some of 
the worst hardships of workmen redressed, or the dogmas of 
Orthodoxy somewhat relaxed. But when a great social in- 
stitution is seriously threatened we must deal with the real revo- 
lutionists who have a consistent aim and mean what they say. 
And the real revolutionists aim at the total "emancipation" of 
women, and by this they mean that law, custom, convention, 
and public opinion shall leave every adult woman free to do 
whatever any adult man is free to do, and without let or reproach, 
to live in any way, adopt any habit, follow any pursuit, and 
undertake any duty, public or private, which is open or reserved 
to men. 

Now I deliberately say that this result would be the most 
disastrous to human civilization of any which could afflict it — 
worse than to return to slavery and polytheism. If only a 
small minority of women availed themselves of their "freedom," 
the beauty of womanliness would be darkened in every home. 
Just as if but a few married people accepted the legalized 
liberty of parting by consent, every husband and every wife 
would feel their married life sensibly precarious and unsettled. 
There is nothing that I know of but law and convention to hin- 
der a fair percentage of women from becoming active members 
of Parliament and useful ministers of the Crown, learned pro- 
fessors of Hebrew and anatomy, very fair priests, advocates, 
surgeons, nay, tailors, joiners, cab drivers, or soldiers, if they 
gave their minds to it. The shouting which takes place when 
a woman passes a good examination, makes a clever speech, 
manages well an institution, climbs a mountain, or makes a 
perilous journey of discovery, always struck me as very foolish 
and most inconsistent. I have so high an opinion of the brains 
and energy, the courage and resource of women, that I should 
be indeed surprised if a fair percentage of women could not 
achieve all in these lines which is expected of the average man. 
My estimate of women's powers is so real and so great that if 



THE FUTURE OF WOMAN 517 

all occupations were entirely open to women, I believe that 
a great many women would distinguish themselves in all but 
the highest range, and that, in a corrupted state of public opin- 
ion, a very large number of women would waste their lives in 
struggling after distinction. 

Would waste their lives, I say. For they would be strixdng, 
with pain and toil and the sacrifice of all true womanly joys, to 
obtain a lower prize for which they are not best fitted, in lieu 
of a loftier prize for which they are preeminently fit. A lower 
prize, although possibly one richer in money, in fame, or in 
power, but essentially a coarser and more material aim. And 
in an age like this there is too much reason to fear that ambition, 
and the thirst for gain and supremacy, would tempt into the 
unnatural competition many a fine and womanly nature. Our 
daughters continually desire to see their names in newspapers, 
to display the cheap glories of academic or professional honors, 
to contemplate their bankers' pass books in private, and to 
advertise in public their athletic record. 

Let us teach them that this specious agitation must ultimately 
degrade them, sterilize them, unsex them. The glory of woman 
is to be tender, loving, pure, inspiring in her home ; it is to raise 
the moral tone of every household, to refine every man with 
whom, as wife, daughter, sister, or friend, she has intimate con- 
verse ; to form the young, to stimulate society, to mitigate the 
harshness and cruelty and vulgarity of life everywhere. And it 
is no glory to woman to forsake all this and to read for honors 
with towelled head in a college study, to fight with her own 
brother for a good "practice," to spend the day in offices and the 
night in the "House." These things have to be done — and 
men have to do them ; it is their nature. But the other, the 
higher duties of love, beauty, patience, and compassion, can only 
be performed by women, and by women only so long as it is 
recognized to be their true and essential field. 

It is impossible to do both together. Women must choose 
to be either women or abortive men. They cannot be both 
women and men. When men and women are once started as 



5i8 FREDERIC HARRISON 

competitors in the same fierce race, as rivals and opponents 
instead of companions and helpmates, with the same habits, 
the same ambitions, the same engrossing toil, and the same public 
lives, Woman will have disappeared, society will consist of in- 
dividuals distinguished physiologically, as are horses or dogs, 
into male and female specimens. Family will mean groups of 
men and women who live in common, and Home will mean 
the place where the group collects for shelter. 

The Family is the real social unit, and what society has to 
do is to promote the good of the Family. And in the Family 
woman is as completely supreme as is man in the State. And 
for all moral purposes the Family is more vital, more beautiful, 
more universal than the State. To keep the Family true, 
refined, affectionate, faithful, is a grander task than to govern 
the State ; it is a task which needs the whole energies, the en- 
tire life of Woman. To mix up her sacred duty with the coarser 
occupations of politics and trade is to unfit her for it as com- 
pletely as if a priest were to embark in the business of a money- 
lender. That such primary social truths were ever forgotten 
at all is one of the portents of this age of skepticism, mammon- 
worship, and false glory. Whilst the embers of the older Chiv- 
alry and Religion retained their warmth, no decent man, much 
less woman, could be found to throw ridicule on the chivalrous 
and saintly ideal of woman as man's guardian angel and queen 
of the home. But the ideals of Religion of old are grown faint 
and out of fashion, and the priest of to-day is too often willing 
to go with the times. Is it to be left to the Religion of Hu- 
manity to defend the primeval institutions of society? Let 
us then honor the old-world image of Woman as being relieved 
by man from the harder tasks of industry, from the defense and 
management of the State, in order that she may set herself to 
train up each generation to be worthier than the last, and may 
make each home in some sense a heaven of peace on earth. 



XIX 

THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR i 

William James 

[The Moral Equivalent of War, the last public utterance of William James, 
is significant as expressing the opinions of a practical psychologist on a ques- 
tion of growing popular interest. For the past fifteen years the movement 
for promoting international peace has been enlisting the support of organi- 
zations and individuals the world over. That this is a question on which 
much may be said for the opposition, James, though a pacificist, admits with 
his usual fair-mindedness, pointing out that militarism is the sole nourisher 
of certain human virtues that the world cannot let die, and that until the 
peace party devises some substitute, some moral equivalent, for the dis- 
ciplinary value of war, their Utopian goal is neither desirable nor possible. 
His own solution is advanced not as a practical measure, but merely as an 
illustration to show that the world is full of opportunities for the peaceful 
development and continuation of the martial qualities of human life. 

This essay was written for general dissemination as a publication of the 
American Association for International Conciliation, February, 1910. As it 
not only presents a peace program but defines as well the most familiar 
arguments of the war party, no militarist article has been included, although 
it may be mentioned that a suggestive apology for war is to be found among 
De Quincey's Essays and also in Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive. Additional 
documents on conciliation, approaching the question from innumerable 
points of view, are published by the Association mentioned above.] 

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or 
camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded 
to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes 
are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as 
well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the 

^ Reprinted by permission of the American Association for International 
Conciliation, and of Messrs. Longmans, Green, and Company, publishers of 
Memories and Studies, by William James. 

519 



520 WILLIAM JAMES 

vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical 
in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, 
north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a 
thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from 
history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present 
time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably 
hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, 
those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part 
of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth 
more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people 
whether they would be willing in cold blood to start another 
civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one 
man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern 
eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely 
for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, 
only when an enemy's injustice leaves us no alternative, is a 
war now thought permissible. 

It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunt- 
ing men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the 
village and possess the females, was the most profitable, as well 
as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial 
tribes selected, and in chiefs and peoples a pure pugnacity and 
love of glory came to mingle with the more fundamental appetite 
for plunder. 

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better 
avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate 
pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing 
war's irrationality and horror is of no effect upon him. The 
horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life 
in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate 
to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us. 

History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of 
how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector, hilled. No 
detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek 
mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jin- 
goism and imperialism — war for war's sake, all the citizens 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 521 

being warriors. It is horrible reading, because of the irration- 
aHty of it all — save for the purpose of making "history" — ■ 
and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civihzation in intel- 
lectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen. 

Those wars were purely piratical. Pride, gold, women, slaves, 
excitement, were their only motives. In the Peloponnesian war, 
for example, the Athenians asked the inhabitants of Melos 
(the island where the "Venus of Milo" was found), hitherto 
neutral, to own their lordship. The envoys meet, and hold a 
debate which Thucydides gives in full, and which, for sweet 
reasonableness of form, would have satisfied Matthew Arnold. 
"The powerful exact what they can," said the Athenians, "and 
the weak grant what they must." When the Meleans say that 
sooner than be slaves they will appeal to the gods, the Athenians 
reply: "Of the gods we believe and of men we know that, by 
a law of their nature, wherever they can rule they will. This 
law was not made by us, and we are not the first to have acted 
upon it; we did but inherit it, and we know that you and all 
mankind, if you were as strong as we are, would do as we do. So 
much for the gods ; we have told you why we expect to' stand as 
high in their good opinion as you." Well, the Meleans still 
refused, and their town was taken. "The Athenians," Thu- 
cydides quietly says, "thereupon put to death all who were of 
military age and made slaves of the women and children. They 
then colonized the island, sending thither five hundred settlers 
of their own." 

Alexander's career was piracy pure and simple, nothing but 
an orgy of power and plunder, made romantic by the character 
of the hero. There was no rational principle in it, and the 
moment he died his generals and governors attacked one another. 
The cruelty of those times is incredible. When Rome finally 
conquered Greece, Paulus ^milius was told by the Roman 
Senate to reward his soldiers for their toil by "giving" them the 
old kingdom of Epirus. They sacked seventy cities and carried 
off a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants as slaves. How 
many they killed I know not ; but in EtoUa they killed all the 



522 WILLIAM JAMES 

senators, five hundred and fifty in number. Brutus was "the 
noblest Roman of them all," but to reanimate his soldiers on 
the eve of Philippi he similarly promises to give them the 
cities of Sparta and Thessalonica to ravage, if they win the 
fight. 

Such was the gory nurse that trained societies to cohesiveness. 
We inherit the warlike type ; and for most of the capacities of 
heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this 
cruel history. Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any 
tribes of other type than this they have left no survivors. Our 
ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and 
thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popu- 
lar imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public 
opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can 
withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with 
bluflf, but couldn't stay there, the military tension was too much 
for them. In 1898 our people had read the word WAR in letters 
three inches high for three months in every newspaper. The 
pliant politician McKinley was swept away by their eagerness, 
and our squalid war with Spain became a necessity. 

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental 
mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as 
ever, but are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely 
curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing 
up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery 
seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must 
be found for attributing them solely to the enemy. England 
and we, our army and navy authorities repeat without ceasing, 
arm solely for "peace," Germany and Japan it is who are bent 
on loot and glory. "Peace" in military mouths to-day is a 
synonym for "war expected." The word has become a pure 
provocative, and no government wishing peace sincerely should 
allow it ever to be printed in a newspaper. Every up-to-date 
dictionary should say that "peace" and "war" mean the same 
thing, now in posse, ^ now in actu? It may even reasonably be 
^ As a possibility. — ■ Editors. ^ ^s a fact. — Editors. 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 523 

said that the intensely sharp competitive preparation for war 
by the nations is the real war, permanent, unceasing ; and that 
the battles are only a sort of public verification of the mastery 
gained during the "peace" interval. 

It is plain that on this subject civilized man has developed a 
sort of double personality. If we take European nations, no 
legitimate interest of any one of them would seem to justify 
the tremendous destructions which a war to compass it would 
necessarily entail. It would seem as though common sense 
and reason ought to find a way to reach agreement in every 
conflict of honest interests. I myself think it our bounden duty 
to believe in such international rationality as possible. But, 
as things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the 
peace party and the war party together, and I believe that the 
difficulty is due to certain deficiencies in the program of pacif- 
icism which set the militarist imagination strongly, and to a cer- 
tain extent justifiably, against it. In the whole discussion both 
sides are on imaginative and sentimental ground. It is but one 
Utopia against another, and everything one says must be 
abstract and hypothetical. Subject to this criticism and cau- 
tion, I will try to characterize in abstract strokes the opposite 
imaginative forces, and point out what to my own very fallible 
mind seems the best Utopian hypothesis, the most promising 
line of conciliation. 

In my remarks, pacificist though I am, I will refuse to speak of 
the bestial side of the war regime (already done justice to by 
many writers) and consider only the higher aspects of milita- 
ristic sentiment. Patriotism no one thinks discreditable; nor 
does any one deny that war is the romance of history. But 
inordinate ambitions are the soul of every patriotism, and the 
possibility of violent death the soul of all romance. The mili- 
tarily patriotic and romantic-minded everywhere, and especially 
the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment 
that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. 
The notion of a sheep's paradise like that revolts, they say, our 
higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life ? 



524 WILLIAM JAMES 

If war had ever stopped, we should have to reinvent it, on this 
view, to redeem life from flat degeneration. 

Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it 
religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. Its profits are to the van- 
quished as well as to the victor ; and quite apart from any ques- 
tion of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human 
nature at its highest dynamic. Its "horrors" are a cheap price 
to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world 
of clerks and teachers, of coeducation and zoophily, of "con- 
sumer's leagues" and "associated charities," of industrialism 
unlimited and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no 
valor any more ! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet ! 

So far as the central essence of this feeling goes, no healthy- 
minded person, it seems to me, can help to some degree partaking 
of it. Militarism is the great preserver of our ideals of hardi- 
hood, and human life with no use for hardihood would be con- 
temptible. Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would 
be insipid indeed ; and there is a type of military character which 
every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for 
every one is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent 
on mankind, of keeping military characters in stock — of keeping 
them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces 
of perfection, — so that Roosevelt's weaklings and mollycoddles 
may not end by making everything else disappear from the face 
of nature. 

This natural sort of feeling forms, I think, the innermost soul 
of army writings. Without any exception known to me, mili- 
tarist authors take a highly mystical view of their subject, and 
regard war as a biological or sociological necessity, uncontrolled 
by ordinary psychological checks and motives. When the time 
of development is ripe the war must come, reason or no reason, 
for the justifications pleaded are invariably fictitious. War is, in 
short, a permanent human obligation. General Homer Lea, in his 
recent book. The Fa/oro//gwora»ce,plantshimself squarely on this 
ground. Readiness for war is for him the essence of nationality, 
and ability in it the supreme measure of the health of nations. 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 525 

Nations, General Lea says, are never stationary — they must 
necessarily expand or shrink, according to their vitality or de- 
crepitude. Japan now is culminating ; and by the fatal law in 
question it is impossible that her statesmen should not long since 
have entered, with extraordinary foresight, upon a vast policy of 
conquest — the game in which the first moves were her wars 
with China and Russia and her treaty with England, and of 
which the final objective is the capture of the Philippines, the 
Hawaiian Islands, Alaska, and the whole of our coast west of 
the Sierra Passes. This will give Japan what her ineluctable 
vocation as a state absolutely forces her to claim, the possession 
of the entire Pacific Ocean ; and to oppose these deep designs we 
Americans have, according to our author, nothing but our con- 
ceit, our ignorance, our commercialism, our corruption, and our 
feminism. General Lea makes a minute technical comparison 
of the military strength which we at present could oppose to the 
strength of Japan, and concludes that the islands, Alaska, Oregon, 
and Southern California, would fall almost without resistance, 
that San Francisco must surrender in a fortnight to a Japanese 
investment, that in three or four months the war would be over, 
and our Republic, unable to regain what it had heedlessly neg- 
lected to protect sufficiently, would then "disintegrate," until 
perhaps some Caesar should arise to weld us again into a nation. 

A dismal forecast indeed ! Yet not unplausible, if the mental- 
ity of Japan's statesmen be of the Caesarian type of which history 
shows so many examples, and which is all that General Lea seems 
able to imagine. But there is no reason to think that women can 
no longer be the mothers of Napoleonic or Alexandrian char- 
acters ; and if these come in Japan and find their opportunity, 
just such surprises as The Valor of Ignorance paints may lurk in 
ambush for us. Ignorant as we still are of the innermost recesses 
of Japanese mentality, we may be foolhardy to disregard such 
possibilities. 

Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their 
considerations. The Philosophie des Krieges, by S. R. Stein- 
jnetz, is a good example. War, according to this author, is an 



$126 <J WILLIAM JAMES ic^-? ^ ^ ( 

ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balatice. 
It is the essential form of the state, and the only function in 
which peoples can employ all their powers at once and conver- 
gently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality 
of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not re- 
sponsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, 
education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and 
vigor — there isn't a moral or intellectual point of superiority 
that doesn't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples 
upon one another. Die W eltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht^; and 
Dr. Steinmetz does not beheve that in the long run chance and 
luck play any part in apportioning the issues. 

The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow, 
superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military com- 
petition ; but the strain on them, being infinitely intenser in the S 
latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No 
ordeal is comparable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is 
the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such 
states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The 
only alternative is "degeneration." 

Dr. Steinmetz is a conscientious thinker, and his book, short as 
it is, takes much into account. Its upshot can, it seems to me, be 
summed up in Simon Patten's word, that mankind was nursed 
in pain and fear, and that the transition to a "pleasure economy" 
may be fatal to a being wielding no powers of defense against its 
disintegrative influences. If we speak of the fear of emaricipation 
from the fear regime, we put the whole situation into a single 
phrase ; fear regarding ourselves now taking the place of the an- 
cient fear of the enemy. 

Turn the fear over as I will in my mind, it all seems to lead 
back to two unwillingnesses of the imagination, one aesthetic, and 
the other moral : unwillingness, first to envisage a future in 
which army life, with its many elements of charm, shall be for- 
ever impossible, and in which the destinies of peoples shall never- 
more be decided quickly, thrillingly, and tragically, by force, but 

^ The history of the world is the judgment of the world. — Editors. 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 527 

only gradually and insipidly by ''evolution"; and, secondly 
unwillingness to see the supreme theater of human strenuousness 
closed, and the splendid military aptitudes of men doomed to 
keep always in a state of latency and never show themselves in 
action. These insistent unwillingnesses, no less than other 
aesthetic and ethical insistencies, have, it seems to me, to be lis- 
tened to and respected. One cannot meet them effectively by 
mere counter-insistency on war's expensiveness and horror. The 
horror makes the thrill ; and when the question is of getting the 
extremest and supremest out of human nature, talk of expense 
sounds ignominious. The weakness of so much merely negative 
criticism is evident — pacificism makes no converts from the 
military party. The military party denies neither the bestiality 
nor the horror, nor the expense ; it only says that these things 
tell but half the story. It only says that war is worth them ; that, 
taking human nature as a whole, its wars are its best protection 
against its weaker and more cowardly self, and that mankind 
cannot afford to adopt a peace economy. 

Pacificists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and 
ethical point of view of their opponents. Do that first in any 
controversy, says J. J. Chapman ; then move the point, and your 
opponent will follow. So long as anti-militarists propose no sub- 
stitute for war's disciplinary function, no moral equivalent of war, 
analogous, as one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of 
heat, so long they fail to realize the full inwardness of the situa- 
tion. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and 
sanctions pictured in the Utopias they paint are all too weak and 
tame to touch the military minded. Tolstoi's pacificism is the 
only exception to this rule, for it is profoundly pessimistic as re- 
gards all this world's values, and makes the fear of the Lord fur- 
nish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. 
But our socialistic peace advocates all believe absolutely in this 
world's values ; and instead of the fear of the Lord and the fear 
of the enemy, the only fear they reckon with is the fear of pov- 
erty if one be lazy. This weakness pervades all the socialistic 
literature with which I am acquainted. Even n Lowes Dickin- 



528 WILLIAM JAMES 

son's exquisite dialogue,^ high wages and short hours are the only 
forces invoked for overcoming man's distaste for repulsive kinds 
of labor. Meanwhile men at large still live as they always have 
lived, under a pain-and-fear economy — for those of us who live 
in an ease economy are but an island in the stormy ocean — and 
the whole atmosphere of present-day Utopian literature tastes 
mawkish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life's 
more bitter flavors. It suggests, in truth, ubiquitous inferiority. 

Inferiority is always with us, and merciless scorn of it is the key- 
note of the military temper. "Dogs, would you live forever ?" 
shouted Frederick the Great. "Yes," say our Utopians, "let us 
live forever, and raise our level gradually." The best thing 
about our " inferiors " to-day is that they are as tough as nails, and 
physically and morally almost as insensitive. Utopianism would 
see them soft and squeamish, while militarism would keep their 
callousness, but transfigure it into a meritorious characteristic, 
needed by "the service," and redeemed by that from the sus- 
picion of inferiority. All the qualities of a man acquire dignity 
when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him 
needs them. If proud of the collectivity, his own pride rises in 
proportion. No collectivity is like an army for nourishing such 
pride ; but it has to be confessed that the only sentiment which 
the image of pacific cosmopolitan industrialism is capable of 
arousing in countless worthy breasts is shame at the idea of be- 
longing to such a collectivity. It is obvious that the United 
States of America as they exist to-day impress a mind like Gen- 
eral Lea's as so much human blubber. Where is the sharpness 
and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one's own, or 
another's? Where is the savage "yes" and "no," the uncondi- 
tional duty ? Where is the conscription ? Where is the blood 
tax ? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to ? 

Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my 
own Utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the 
gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The 
fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know 

^ Justice and Liberty, N. Y., 1909. 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 529 

that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to pruden- 
tial checlcs and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of 
enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the 
science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the 
sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and im- 
possible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will 
have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make 
common cause against them. I see no reason why all this should 
not apply to yellow as well as to white countries, and I look for- 
ward to a future when acts of war shall be formally outlawed as 
between civilized peoples. 

All these beliefs of mine put me squarely into the anti-mili- 
tarist party. But I do not believe that peace either ought to be 
or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states pacifically 
organized preserve some of the old elements of army discipline. 
A permanently successful peace economy cannot be a simple 
pleasure economy. In the more or less socialistic future towards 
which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves col- 
lectively to these severities which answer to our real position upon 
this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies 
and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military 
mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring 
cement ; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private 
interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon 
which states are built — unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous 
reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and 
liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for 
military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neigh- 
borhood. 

The war party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming 
that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race 
through war, are absolute and permanent human goods. Patri- 
otic pride and ambition in their military form are, after all, only 
specifications of a more general competitive passion. They are 
its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its 
last form. Men now are proud of belonging to a conquering 



530 WILLIAM JAMES 

nation, and without a murmur they lay down their persons and 
their wealth, if by so doing they may fend ofT subjection. But 
who can be sure that other aspects of one's country may not, with 
time and education and suggestion enough, come to be regarded 
with similarly eflfective feelings of pride and shame ? Why 
should men not some day feel that it is worth a blood tax to be- 
long to a collectivity superior in any ideal respect ? Why should 
they not blush with indignant shame if the community that owns 
them is vile in any way whatsoever ? Individuals, daily more 
numerous, now feel this civic passion. It is only a question of 
blowing on the spark till the whole population gets incandescent, 
and on the ruins of the old morals of military honor, a stable sys- 
tem of morals of civic honor builds itself up. What the whole 
community comes to believe in grasps the individual as in a vise. 
The war function has grasped us so far ; but constructive inter- 
ests may some day seem no less imperative, and impose on the 
individual a hardy lighter burden. 

Let me illustrate my idea more concretely. There is nothing 
to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that 
men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once 
for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by 
mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of 
nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority im- 
posed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively 
no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at 
all, — this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. 
It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have 
nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. 
If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military 
conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to 
form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted 
against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and 
numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The 
military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into 
the growing fiber of the people ; no one would remain blind as the 
luxurious classes now are blind, to man's real relations to the 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 531 

globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard founda- 
tions of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, 
to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes washing, 
and window washing, to road building and tunnel making, to 
foundries and stokeholes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would 
our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to 
get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into 
society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They 
would have paid their blood tax, done their own part in the 
immemorial human warfare against nature, they would tread the 
earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, 
they would be better fathers and teachers of the following 
generation. 

Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would 
have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would 
preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues 
which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. 
We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as 
little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily 
because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to de- 
grade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral 
equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that 
can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent dis- 
cipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But 
I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of 
social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of 
organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some 
other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but 
a question of time, of skillful propagandism, and of opinion- 
making men seizing historic opportunities. 

The martial type of character can be bred without war. 
Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests 
and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should 
all feel some degree of it imperative if we were conscious of our 
work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, 
as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. 



532 WILLIAM JAMES 

We could be poor, then, without humihation, as army officers 
now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the 
civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper. 
H. G. Wells, as usual, sees the center of the situation. " In many 
ways," he says, " military organization is the most peaceful of 
activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, 
of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, under- 
selling and intermittent employment, into the barrack yard, he 
steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service 
and cooperation and of infinitely more honorable emulations. 
Here at least men are not flung out of employment to degenerate 
because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are 
fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here at least a 
man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not 
by self-seeking. And beside the feeble and irregular endowment 
of research by commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at 
profit by innovation and scientific economy, see how remarkable 
is the steady and rapid development of method and appliances 
in naval and military affairs! Nothing is more striking than 
to compare the progress of civil conveniences which has been 
left almost entirely to the trader, to the progress in military ap- 
paratus during the last few decades. The house appliances of 
to-day, for example, are little better than they were fifty years 
ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly 
heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the 
house of 1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still 
satisfactory places of residence, so little have our standards 
risen. But the rifle or battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all 
comparison inferior to those we possess ; in power, in speed, in 
convenience alike. No one has a use now for such superan- 
nuated things." ^ 

Wells adds ^ that he thinks that the conceptions of order and 
discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fit- 
ness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility, which 
universal military duty is now teaching European nations, will 
1 First and Last Things, 1908, p. 215. ^ Ibid., p. 226. 



THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR 533 

remain a permanent acquisition, when the last ammunition has 
been used in the fireworks that celebrate the final peace. I 
believe as he does. It would be simply preposterous if the only 
force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency 
into English or American natures should be the fear of being 
killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is Fear ; 
but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe and try to make 
us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher 
ranges of men's spiritual energy. The amount of alteration in 
public opinion which my Utopia postulates is vastly less than the 
difference between the mentality of those black warriors who 
pursued Stanley's party on the Congo with their cannibal war 
cry of "Meat! Meat!" and that of the "general staff" of any 
civilized nation. History has seen the latter interval bridged 
over : the former one can be bridged over much more easily. 



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